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User Group Urges IBM To Open OS/2
axonis writes "A report on Tom's Hardware tells of one of the last active OS/2 user groups, which has announced an initiative to garner support for IBM to release its long-neglected OS/2 operating system into the open source community. IBM announced earlier this month that it will withdraw its operating system OS/2 officially from sale on December 23 this year and will offer support only through 2006." From the article: "Making OS/2 Open Source will benefit all IBM customers that had invested in this OS...Customers that are willing to continue using OS/2 will get the benefits of an open OS that will be continuously developed by individual developers and/or software companies, their ownership fees will decrease and they will have the enhanced security of an OS that will continue to be relevant due to the open-ended nature of open source (following the BSD and Linux examples)."
I've heard of it and used it a little back in the day but wan't too up on the history: Wikipedia to the rescue!
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Some people in this discussion might be interested
to know that there is a project underway to create a "from scratch" clone of OS/2, under an open-source license.
See http://www.osfree.org/index.php for more details.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code.
Exactly. When I worked at MS, I have seen files in the Windows source tree that had comments saying they were part of OS/2. They were also marked as 'Copyright Microsoft' only, which implies that MS licensed their source to IBM, but kept the copyright.
Is that you can't Open Source the entire Operating System, and at this point it would cost more to perform the code audit and legal audit to make this happen that it would to simply take the black eye of killing it. If you think about it, it makes sense. OS/2 is, and never was, just the operating system. Think back to installing OS/2, especially in the pre 4.0 days. You didn't just install OS/2, you also installed LAN Server (or LAN Manager in earlier days), TCP/IP for the Internet, eventyually you got MMPM and others, but these are all seperate packages that are more or less bolted onto the core. It's probably reasonable to release parts of OS/2, but you can't release all of it, particularly the parts licensed from third parties. That's the real kicker. In order to Open Source OS/2 in the sense that most people want is a logistical nightmare that would encompass years and a cost that IBM would have no hope of ever recovering. So what is the next best option? release the source for the important parts. SOM ? can't because of Microsoft licensing. WPS? can't, Adobe PostScript font rendering engine. Those are just items from the top of my head, and I haven't used OS/2 in close to 10 years now. It's a nice dream, but it's unlikely to ever happen. kanga
Yup. Actually they really can't.
The local IBM's LTC (Linux Technology Center) had even started working on a OS/2 emulation layer for Linux - about one month later the project was pulled by the internal lawyers.
-><- no
"It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code. "
In the summer of 1995 [1], I worked at IBM in Austin for the OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise [2]group. OS/2 LAN Server was a direct descendent of the LAN Manager product that shipped with the original joint IBM/MS versions of OS/2 [3]. As a result of its origins, OS/2 LAN Server had huge amounts of Microsoft code baked in.
In an effort to eliminate the Microsoft code, IBM had divided the development team into two groups: "Clean" and "Dirty". "Dirty" staff being staff that had seen Microsoft code and was not eligible to help in the rewrite. I don't know how far the effort went.
1] I saw a beta of Windows 95 for the first time running on a Pentium 100 in an IBM FV Test lab.
2] LS Enterprise entailed the conversion of LS Advanced to use DCE services for authentication, etc.
3] LAN manager was originally part of OS/2 "Extended Edition".
Nader asked IBM to do this years ago: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/06/08/213122 7&tid=136