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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)."
Either you think IBM hasn't thought about releasing OS/2 or that IBM is missing a business opportunity.
The cold hard fact is that IBM can't release the source code. So many non-disclosure agreements have sealed the fate of OS/2. The only good thing that can come from OS/2s demise is that people will think very carefully before going into software that has a shelf life with no possibility of saving.
Competition!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But diversity is always good, and what does IBM have to lose?
Nothing. It's all the other companies (i.e. Microsoft) that have IP bundled with OS/2 that will lose.
Thus it's pointless to dredge up this discussion again and again (yes, I believe this is at least the third time in many years).
No matter how much IBM would love to open it up to us, they just can't. Go whine to Microsoft and the 100s of other code contributers first.
"oh, shit, how are we going to explain that it's just a bunch of cats taped together?"
Surely the code contains proprietary software that IBM doesn't want to open source, but that doesn't mean that they can't open up the rest. Part of the magic of open source is that people will write the necessary software to fill those gaps.
However, I can't see IBM releasing the source until after December 23rd. It's not until that point that OS/2 becomes immediately unprofitable. If IBM holds up its promise to support OS/2 through 2006, then the source will hit the ground running and be able to get help from its parents while the teachers begin to take over, thus the transition from closed to open goes well and is supported by the original developers, even if only for a year.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
I'm sure that as I type a hundred people will have posted the reasons why IBM could not open the code even if they wanted to (Microsoft co-own it, etc), but I personally think opening it would not really benefit many people. The code-base is years old and an attempt to getting it running on newer hardware would probably be doomed to failure so, since a lot of the reasons people like it was the GUI design of the thing, why not just clone it and re-implement all the great ideas? I wouldn't be at all surprised if a re-write of the shell on top of Linux/ BSD wouldn't take a lot less time and effort than dragging an ancient code-base into the 21st century and torturing it into something that works well on current hardware.
Yeah, it would never happen, because, as you mention, there are too many NDAs, restrictive licenses and copyrights tied up in OS/2's code.
Which is a shame, really, because releasing the source would not only give eternal life to OS/2, it would also vastly improve the other free software out there by allowing them to integrate (or at least port) portions of OS/2 to their systems. Linux might be able to add support to run OS/2 binaries or learn how its scheduler handles pre-emptive or realtime tasking.
Unfortunately, since OS/2 is closed source, the product will eventually die off when the hardware that can run it becomes obsolete. This is one of the real unfortunate sides to closed source software -- when its owner abandons it, it's dead.
IBM has been championing Linux for servers for quite a while now. By creating demand for Linux based servers, IBM creates a customer base that excludes the MSFT/DELL alliance and creates a base for their lucrative service contracts. Any success an open-sourced OS/2 would have would distract from this.
It's very important for companies' initiatives to be well-focused. If IBM released OS/2 to the community, they will dilute their Linux marketing campaign and further fragment the customer base they are trying to build. If OS/2 took off like mad, that would be yet another OS that IBM has to qual test it's servers with. While I have fond memories of using OS/2 and realize that many of its innovations are standard features in today's operating systems, I wouldn't want it polluting the OS base for all time to come. And apparently, neither does IBM.
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.
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
all the ATM machines that still use OS/2...releasing the code for a product that handles money is probably not the wisest of ideas...
... right?
...
Right, and security through obscurity works so well, which is why Windows is so much harder to hack than Linux.
Um
Oh, wait
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
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.
Nader asked IBM to do this years ago: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/06/08/213122 7&tid=136