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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."
Seems to me that IBM's reputation as being the friendly giant to open source is unfounded, particularly in light of how much many members of the open-source community hate Sun.
Whereas Sun gave away their crown jewels, IBM won't even give away their garbage
anyone wanna bet that IBM has some sort of outstanding contract that does actually prevent this? IBM is awfully friendly to OSS. I can't think the other two reasons matter that much in their eyes.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
funny that IBM claims Open Source is more secure, and financially viable, then cites security and business reasons for not opening the source up. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Open Source fanatic (Note the capitalization), but it makes me doubt where IBM's allegiances lay.
Copyright was created so that people could have a limited period in which they would be able to make commercial gain from it. Now its perpetual, often long beyond the product's commercial life, so it certainly is reasonable for people to ask the copyright holders of abandonware to free up their source code.
"...a variety of business, technical, and legal reasons..."
Business - We're sorry, some businesses are still using OS/2 for some mission critical stuff, we've reviewed the code and it's got some major security flaws. By making it open source, these companies who still use the software will be open to all sorts of attacks as we've stopped supporting the software and won't be releasing any new patches.
Technical - We want to fix all the flaws but it's not worth our time, we could release the code and have the community do it but most of these businesses lack the IT guys to do the massive updates on all their systems (otherwise they'd be using something other than OS/2) so they'd be open to attacks of anyone who cares enough to try.
Legal - We didn't write all of our own code, we borrowed from a few places and signed some agreements that say we can't show anyone else the code. We could make half the project open source but that'd be pretty useless and people will get on our case about not releasing all the code, then there's the whole exposing all the flaws problem, which leaves no one happy in this scenario.
Yes I know security through obscurity doesn't usually work, but this product has reached it's end of life, there won't be any more updates. IBM realizes they have some big customers using OS/2 for some pretty major stuff and if they were to just show the world OS/2s exploits, it might end badly for a company still relying on OS/2. They're probably not going to trust the community submitted patches (they can't afford to have the systems go down, and as far as they know the systems are rock solid so why chance bringing everything down to close a hole that someone MIGHT use to cause damage.) Then when something happens and someone causes some damage exploiting a hole, the company is going to sue IBM for releasing the code and making the attack possible.
Anyway, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
As much as I admire freedom, demanding censorship as the path to freedom is like demanding that people starve so that they may be nourished.
Freedom is a chaotic, and at times terrible and insulting entity. I'm afraid you'll just have to live with the trolls. I like my Internet free, and not constrained, not even by those who seek to do good.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Another reason (there were multiple) may be that they would prefer to move customers to other (Linux based) solutions and ensure OS/2 die a proper death. Perhaps they fear that making OS/2 OSS would also help keep it alive for longer than they want it to be.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
So they should spend an absolute fortune on preparing the code for release, separating it out from the stuff that doesn't belong to them and spending thousands of lawyer hours checking that it's all okay to release for what, 11,000 petitioners? Just to put that into context, the current petition to get Goldeneye on XBox live arcade is at 18,000 signatures and growing.
It's not as if once they'd removed all the stuff didn't belong to them they'd be left with a working system, just random chunks of code, many of which will likely be somewhat worthless without the rest of the code that had to be removed.
Back in those days I had a Mac || which was the ultimate fast coolest home machine in my geek BBS world.
Windows *was* around but it was slow and buggy on the XT/AT class machines that were around. The competition that Mac owners were worried about was OS/2 and Presentation Manager which was arguably superior to the MacOS of the day. Unfortunately, Windows came first and there were apps for it and (almost) none for the new OS/2.
So the brilliant marketing boys at IBM decided to support Windows and Windows apps under OS/2 and market it as a "better Windows than Windows". And it was - about the only stable way to run Windows before 3.1 was to run in under OS/2. So they basically supported MS's buggy product and discouraged migration of apps to their much superior system (why not just develop for Windows if OS/2 can run Windows too?). When MS finally fixed Windows, there was no reason to run it under OS/2, no reason for most of the buyers to continue OS/2 and no reason for developers to do the considerable work of porting their DOS apps to OS/2 rather than Windows 3.1.
That was the analyses that I remember from back then anyway.
Indeed, OS/2 uses ring 2 and 3 of the x86 processors, rendering OS/2 non-portable and non-virtualizable without major effort.
Played with OS/2 from 1993 until late 1996. I think I've used 2.1, 2.11, 3.0 and even 4.0 (Merlin?) after upgrading my previously 4MB 386 to 8MB and then later to a whopping 16MB (and a 486 and later a Pentium). It was an exhilarating, rewarding but often also excruciatingly frustrating experience.
It multitasked better and more stable than Win95, but was hampered with missing hardware and software support. And the lack of marketing and market understanding on IBM's side.
I abandoned OS/2 when it was finally clear that IBM would not improve it neither on the home user nor on the business side.
I still am in some respects. I was one of the first 100 people certified as an OS/2 Engineer by IBM back in the day, and I still have a Warp box running here for old times sake.
That being said, and while I'd love to poke through the source, I'd rather see some of the technologies and concepts from OS/2 opened up. I would just love to see what OSS could do for the Workplace Shell, for example. The WPS is STILL more advanced than any Windows shell ever has been. Just imagine where it might be today if developement hadn't stopped.
I also wouldn't mind seeing a compatability layer built for Linux, so that all my old OS/2 apps would work on a Linux kernel. If licensing is constrained then they could always (gasp!) put out a closed library and just expose the API.
None of it is likely to happen, but it would be nice.
"We won't be free until every racist is silenced."
That is not true, this is just censorship. We will not be free until every racist is educated, and for those who still can't get it, ridiculed.
It's 1996, and I'm working at a university where the department IT guy is a rabid OS/2 fanatic. The whole department ran on Warp, but this brand new version of NT (4.0) has just come out with a Win95-like interface but decent internals, so the battle was on.
One day I wander down to the campus bookstore. They have copies of OS/2 in stock- the version with TCP/IP and a web browser was something like $200. Next to it was the development kit, in a plain box- $700.
On the other shelf is a copy of WinNT 4.0. $99. That $99 was the full version, and it included a full copy of Visual C++ as well.
IBM simply didn't care about the academic market at all. MS cares a *lot*- they learned from Apple that if you get people hooked earlier they are stuck with you for life.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The OP is a coward who uses anonymous posts to hide his identity. But the fact that he consistently manages to get the first or second post means he's also a subscriber. Why not make it so subscribers can't post anonymously until the topic is opened up to everyone? That would limit the visibility of this kind of post without limiting anyone else's freedom.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The WPS was nimble and fast compared to KDE and Gnome. And no, I still haven't found either to be as drag-and-drop flexible as the WPS was.