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?

[MightyMartian]

Oh for fuck's sake. OS/2 is filled with other folks' IP, particularly Microsoft's. Big chunks of it were largely written out of Redmond. Yes, in-house teams took over starting with version 3 (Warp), but all that Lanman code and many of the 16-bit APIs are all at least in part Microsoft's. IBM can't open source it.

About the only thing in this day and age that I'd like to see would be the Workplace Shell ported to X. It still makes Windows look like its inbred retarded cousin. As for everything else, the operating system is old, and I don't think there's much in it that hasn't already been done elsewhere anyways.