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

Licensing and open source

[dryeo]

One of the advantages of SOM is that it allows a closed source environment to be extended. Don't like the file dialog, subclass it with a better one. Or a recent example, need transparent png bolted on your 10 year old OS, well create a few new classes and use Cairo to display them. Suddenly you have modern transparent icons, transparent widgets on the desktop etc.
Unluckily with GPL you can get into issues of whether closed source or just incompatible licensed libraries can be added. One of the ideas behind SOM/DSOM was that anyone could write a DLL and extend the WPS. Now it seems that in free software land you often have to worry about incompatible licenses.
If IBM ever does open source SOM/DSOM I hope it is with something liberal like the LGPL. Don't have to think about issues with linking and the important source stays open.

You Don't Want It

[scherrey]

I did two contracts with IBM in the early 90's, one on the OS/2 2.1 change team. In both I "got" to deal with SOM and its implementation source code. It's a giant nasty C macro & function pointer hack. OS/2's Workplace Shell was very cool but the underlying implementation was pretty nasty stuff. One of my fixes was dealing with how slow it was populating icons in folders. SOM is a good example of the "Prototry" anti-pattern where one does an initial implementation of a cool trick then ends up shipping & extending it rather than ever bothering to architect it right in the first place. I can understand why IBM doesn't want this source out in public. FWIW - I also had to deal with some of the Microsoft source code, especially device driver stuff. Was the worse C code I've ever seen in production...

If you like SOM & Workplace Shell features you'll find it far easier to implement on top of Qt/KDE or wxWidgets or a smart functional integration of some Boost library features & a GUI than you'd ever have hopes of getting that code to work with anything modern or useful today. I loved OS/2. Borland had a Beautiful C++ compiler for it and CSet/2 was one of the better standards compliant compilers at the time as well. They're all bit rot by now though. Appreciate the memories but let this one die.