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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)."
It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They really have nothing to gain from open sourcing OS/2 and potentially a lot to lose from doing so.
If Solaris is any example, it costs money to open source code. You have to pay someone to scour the code for inappropriate or confidential information.
Lawyers need to work through any licensing agreements with third parties and so forth.
They're potentially exsposing themselves to lawsuits by showing their knickers to the world. I mean for all we know OS/2 could be filled with stolen UNIX source code and the last thing IBM wants is to actually validate SCO's claims!
Bottom line is that IBM has nothing to gain from spending (wasting?) money to open source OS/2. It's a shame, but that's life.
Maybe that's why the article wants IBM to release "as much OS/2 code as possible", so maybe we have an OS/2-Lite version, (sucn as the 4.4BSD-lite Unix version without the AT&T code) so that the community can fill in the blanks later.
I was at an ATM in a convenience store last summer during a thunderstorm. The power went out and when it came back on, I watched the ATM boot. Guess what? OS/2. There is no way that IBM's lawyers are going to let that code loose so that people can pick it apart. Just the suggestion probably gives them visions of a pony-tailed hacker going from ATM to ATM and filling his Volkwagon mini-bus with cash.
Couple of things: 1. The objection was that BSD requires attribution -- and the claim was the MS was still using BSD code but not giving attribution -- therefore violating the BSD license (which allowed them to use it) therefore violating the copyright. I don't know whether that's true or not -- but that was the claim. 2. You're serously asserting that slashdot posters advocate downloading copies of windows xp? (Legal or not?) I don't think I've ever seen that. I've seen a lot of Microsoft bashing -- and a couple of times I made the suggestion that a very reasonable thing for the Federal Government to do was to refuse to handle ANY Microsoft copyright violation cases while Microsoft failed to comply with antitrust laws - or the consent decree microsoft also completely ignored. The last time I made that suggestion was at least three years ago -- I probably posted as an AC -- I read slashdot, but didn't post much and didn't have an account. So: Criticise slashdot posters for what they really do -- oversimplify the issues and demonize microsoft. Copyright scofflaw'ing has a small amount of support, but it's certainly not the norm. BTW - I think Microsoft deserves much of the abuse it gets -- I just wish more of it was well reasoned, rather than knee-jerk.