Should IBM's SOM/DSOM Be Open Sourced?

Esther Schindler sends a note about two journalists for very different publications (herself one of them) urging IBM to open-source, not all of OS/2 — they've consistently refused to do that — but instead one of its most powerful features: SOM, the System Object Model. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes at desktoplinux.com, "IBM, I'm told by developers who should know, still has all of SOM's source code and it all belongs to IBM. It's because IBM doesn't have all the code for OS/2 and some of it belongs to Microsoft that IBM open-sourcing OS/2 has proven to be a futile hope." And Esther Schindler takes the developer angle in a blog post at CIO.com: "Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in? I dare say it could, especially since the code to accomplish that goal was written (and shelved) more than ten years ago. All it takes to make that code available is to ask IBM to release SOM and DSOM as open-source." What are the business issues that would convince IBM to assent?

Comments

Author

[MrMunkey]

I know this off-topic, but I find it hard to read anything by the author after the recent comments she posted in response to this article: http://comments.cio.com/node/176250?page=4

Disclaimer: the issue with the posts was the level of professionalism, not necessarily the stances on PHP.

Re:Author

[rbanffy]

About my stance on PHP and on most people who defend it, if all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I strongly advise the most vocal PHP fans to try to learn other languages, as most of them seem to have a very limited background. It's good and I am happy they can solve any problem they have, from distributed web applications sharing JSON messages to shell scripting and GTK applications, but no tool fits all roles. It's also not about web frameworks. Let them learn Ruby and Python. Let them grok MVC. Throw in some Lisp, Smalltalk and, while they are at the job, let them give a look at how things are done in C and try to compare C++ to Objective-C. Download the SICP videos from MIT and watch them (if they don't get something, they can always hit "rewind").

And her response could indicate she is under some stress. Maybe a project that is not going right, maybe something completely outside the scope of the discussion (maybe even outside her professional life) made she give the emotional answer we saw to the unlucky anonymous coward who crossed her way.

It's incredibly rare to find someone who knows something else making a strong instance for PHP. Any language and platform deserves better than fanboys defending it.