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OS/2 Community Tries Bounty System
Grayskull writes "The OS/2 and eComStation community are trying to get open source software ported to that platform by opening bounties and allowing people to chip in with prize money. Currently the most important open bounties are Java 6 port, Icon routines in OS/2, VirtualBox port, Extend multimedia and OpenWengo ports."
Openwengo is dead, it's now called Qutecom. Also I'm wondering whether Ekiga is not much mature, especially now version 3.00 is around the corner.
It can't be done. The OS in encumbered by crap from Microsoft and COUNTLESS other contributors. Sun had quite a time releasing Solaris as open-source, and they owned almost all of it.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
There are several embedded systems till using OS/2. One of the biggest is ATM machines, new ones too.
My bank just installed a load of brand new machines, all running OS/2.
Gone!
Odin tries to, but the project's been moribund for about ten years.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
> Try this with Linux or Windows. Keep a link to a file on your desktop, now drop down to the command line and rename the original file. Used to break Linux, it might try to search now, Windows will try a search if it's similar. OS/2 has no such problem, the 2 are automagically linked.
Um, you can do that in Linux with a simple hard link instead of a symbolic link. You could do that in Unix with hard links before symbolic links were even invented and before there was such as thing as Linux, MacOS, OS/2, or MS-Windows.
I'm just chiming from my observations but wasn't OS/2 great for digital phone systems in the 90s and early 2000s before Linux products took the crown? This is of course well before VOIP.
Of course. Heck, OS/2 is still in use in a lot of ATMs, voice mail systems, and so on today, although it's being phased out due to lack of support. But there are ATM's in my area that I know are running OS/2. Our Nortel Norstar voice mail unit at work runs OS/2. In the 1980s and 1990s, OS/2 was very commonly used when you wanted to embed a general-purpose computer system into an "appliance" scenario. That's because it was, to a large extent, the only acceptable option.
Consider, it's 1990, and you want to build some kind of computerized "appliance". Maybe it's a voice mail system, or a bank ATM, or an electronic message board, or whatever. You want to use a general-purpose computer, because that lowers costs and enables third-party "layered product" options. GP hardware is cheaper, software development on a GP platform is easier (since the test target can be the same as the development environment), and there's a bigger third-party community to tap.
So what are your choices? Linux doesn't exist yet. Commercial Unix platforms (SGI/Irix, SunOS, HP-UX, DEC/Ultrix, etc.) are very expensive. BSD is tied up in legal wranglings, and support for commodity micros (IBM-PC, Mac) is limited at the time. DOS barely provides disk services and is useless for everything else, so you'd practically have to write your own OS. MS Windows runs on top of DOS and is basically just a GUI -- inappropriate for most embedded applications -- and has stability issues. Win NT doesn't exist yet. Xenix is a joke. SCO Unix is painfully clunky and hideously expensive.
And then there is OS/2. It's a preemptive multitasking, protected memory OS. It runs on IBM-PC-compatible computers, the platform with the biggest market presence and the most third-party support -- and also the cheapest hardware. It's from IBM, the single biggest name in computing. IBM and Microsoft both say it's the wave of the future. It's relatively inexpensive when purchased in bulk. Seems like a no brainer, right?
Obviously, looking back with 20/20 hindsight today, OS/2 seems like a strange choice, but at the time, it made perfect sense.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
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