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?

[harlows_monkeys]

IBM cannot make OS/2 open source, as they do not own all of it. Parts were developed by Microsoft, and are owned by Microsoft. Many of those parts were rewritten by IBM for later versions of OS/2, but at this late stage, it would likely be a difficult task for them to determine whether or not everything in there is free of third party licenses, and if they can't clear everything, no way in hell are their lawyers going to approve.

Re:IBM vs. Sun?

[bm_luethke]

Yes, but then again they weren't trying to be clear of *Microsoft's* IP - and that is whole different story. At least, as far as I know Sun wasn't - they were trying to be clear of a somewhat OSS friendly (or at least OSS dependent) community/company. Microsoft is not going to handle anything that might maybe possibly in some way infringe upon their IP being out in the wild in a OSS project from an actual company that they can litigate against. Heck they funded an obviously sinking company with obviously no case whatsoever in an attempt to just discredit OSS, this would be a slam dunk compared to that.

IBM is big enough to fight it, no doubt, but they aren't going to make anywhere close to enough for it to be worth it from a business point of view. As much as I see IBM as a traditional corporation that only really sees OSS as a way to save money (why not have competent volunteers develop everything and only pay a few to vett the changes to make sure they are what you want?) I'll even bet they wish they could justify it - after all a "win" would probably boost shareholder confidence and most large companies generally like to stick it to their competition.

Then, of course, it may not be simply a case of "might maybe possibly in some way infringe upon their IP" and in fact totally 100% infringe upon it. In which case IBM isn't *ever* going to find it in their best interest do release it.

I, and the vast majority of people that read Slashdot, don't really know either (someone from IBM who worked on the project would need to weigh in). In any case if it were to make them money then they would do it. Given their past history I would guess if they felt they could get away with it they would (said "Good Will" has made them quite a bit of money). In fact I would also say the way they said "no" was an attempt at saying they wish they could - after all unless they wanted to send another message the easiest way to say "no" was to ignore it.