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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."
Intellectualproperty Be Mine
He will also re-enslave all niggers if elected.
Vote Ron Paul!
R to P.
Vote Ron Paul.
Stop the niggers.
RON PAUL '08
A little-known fact:
If you character-shift by 26, "HAL" spells "NIGGER".
True fact!
Respect to this great hero on this his day of honor.
Ron Paul, MD
So many trolls today.
Why do you NIGGERS keep posting all this racist inflammatory shit about NIGGERS all over the place?
What the fuck is wrong with you, can't you let the NIGGERS have Martin Luther King Jr. day? I mean fuck the dude has four names and he's not Mexican, that has to count for something.
In conclusion stop being NIGGERS about this holiday. Quit posting jokes about NIGGERS on this holiday. Let the NIGGERS have this holiday. You NIGGER.
I mean uh you jiggaboo. Yeah, you coon. Yes, you porchmonkey.
You know theyre improving the transportation in Harlem? Yeah, they're planting the trees closer together.
Why does San Francisco have so many gays and Harlem have so many NIGGERS? San Francisco had first choice.
Time to adopt the SCO tactic and sue IBM for ownership of OS/2!!! How dare IBM have proprietary software.
In all seriousness, I recall reading that besides Microsoft, that IBM is the world's largest software companies (as measured by employees on the payroll) and thanks to acquisitions such as Tivoli, Rational, and Telelogic they own a TON of proprietary software franchises.
That said, this is a non-story. Failed petitions are a dime-a-dozen. The only thing that *might* develop from this story is the motivation to get a petition signed by 100,000 people and see if IBM will take *that* seriously. In the end, they won't. If they are letting OS/2 die, then they are doing it for a reason. If they are simply relegating it to the back burner for a few years so they can modernize and re-introduce it later, good for them.
Maybe there is something that I am missing which would make it beneficial to be able to run OS/2? Wouldn't it require special hardware and/or many software changes before I could run it in my living room? Isn't most of the hardware so ancient that you can't find it anymore? Are there people who actually want to port OS/2 so that it will run on a Dell?
Aside from "Geek Value", there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to me for having access to the OS/2 code (and for real geek value, I would prefer being able to read System V sources by Thompson and Ritchie (though, for all I know that is available somewhere and I just don't know where to look)).
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
When IBM open-sources AIX, I'll call them an open-source friendly company.
Until then, they're just not actively hostile.
True, but irrelevant. The German concentration camps were labor camps, not death camps as they have been mythologized as. The facts are clear on this matter. The only "proof" of the existence of death camps are pictures with misleading captions.
You are kidding aren't you? Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
BM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
Wow, clunky Windows, a menu structure and old Windows 3.11 way of starting applications. Oh, and pretty background pictures. Who would have thunk. I can already feel the magic behind it.
This is no different from Solaris, yet Sun managed to open-source it