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

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?