IBM Won't Open-Source OS/2

wikinerd writes "Following an online petition in November 2007 by members of an OS/2 online community to open-source OS/2, IBM answered by sending a letter via FedEx making it clear that OS/2 is going to remain closed-source, citing business, technical, and legal reasons. An earlier petition in 2005 that had attracted over 11,000 signatures met a similar response. Both petition letters to IBM Corp. can be viewed at the OS2World.com library. The End of Support period for OS/2 passed by in December 2006, and the given IBM's response the future for OS/2 doesn't look bright, unless re-implementation projects such as Voyager or osFree attract the necessary critical mass of operating system developers."

Comments

IBM won't? IBM CAN'T!

[Trenchbroom]

How can they open source OS/2 when a large percentage of the code is still under Microsoft's copyright? I'm sure Microsoft would have NO problem with this--seeing as they are all open source friendly and all. No issues using their own code to dethrone Windows, naturally.

No news here people. Only common sense needed.

eComStation

[hpa]

IBM has already licensed off OS/2 to another company, Serenity Systems, who is continuing to support it under the name eComStation. This might have been an exclusive agreement. There is again, of course, all the issues with whether or not the actually own all the stuff.

Re:IBM vs. Sun?

[SEE]

AT&T was very liberal in the terms it released Unix code rights to Unix vendors in the later 1980s, and even then, Sun went back and paid the SCO Group ten million dollars to secure additional rights to Unix/Xenix code in Solaris before releasing OpenSolaris. Microsoft is the AT&T of OS/2; there's a reason versions 1.0-1.3 were called Microsoft OS/2. Now, what do you think the chances would be of Microsoft agreeing to sell IBM the sort of rights to OS/2 that Sun was able to get to Unix?

IBM would have to do a lot more core-level rewriting than Sun did, because the core stuff is all Microsoft, and Microsoft isn't going to give it up. It's a lot more work for something people have a lot less interest in.

Re:Windows NT

[dryeo]

I can mount HPFS drives under Win2k using pinball.sys from 3.51. Unluckily it is broken if your partitions are over 4 GB (maybe 2 GB?).
I can also run OS/2 v1.x text mode binaries under 2k even cmd.exe.
NT did start as a rewrite of OS/2 and the first version that booted up was OS/2 NT ver 3.
One thing MS did get in the divorce was rights to use version 3 and up which is why OS/2 4.5 is actually ver 2.45 eg
F:\usr\bin>uname -a
OS/2 amad.localdomain 2 2.45 i386

Re:IBM vs. Sun?

[JoshJ]

The question is not "can they sell it" (where "it" refers to an OS CD- ie, the binary) but "can they change the license on the source?"

If they don't have the copyright to it, they may not be able to.

Re:IBM vs. Sun?

[Richard Steiner]

All folder and desktop context menus were configurable via drag-and-drop (you could add commonly used programs to any of 'em), program icons were stored as extended attributes in the filesystem, shortcut icons were able to track the files they were attached to across drives, and the most common ways of launching programs were the Launchpad and the Warpcenter toolbar.

If you think OS/2 2.0 and later were at all like Win 3.1, you simply weren't paying attention.

Perhaps you're remembering Windows NT 3.1 instead?