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."

Comments

Open source the OS

[armanox]

And more people will port Open Source software to it.

Re:Or...

[realmolo]

Exactly. OS/2 is dead, guys. Where have you been?

OS/2 has all kinds of really neat features. In many ways, it's still a signpost of things to come. Unfortunately, it's all built on top of a kernel that incorporates all the mistakes/oversights of early 80s programming techniques.

I'm not sure that this is the place for bounties..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Looking at the list of bounties, I was struck by their paltriness(and, in certain cases, their complete implausibility, "Oh, sure, I'm sure I've got the Skype sourcecode sitting around here somewhere, definitely worth 130 bucks."). I find it difficult to believe that they'll get too many people to work on a closed and rather necrotic OS for that kind of money.

Bounties make a certain amount of sense as a means to reward the efforts of people who work on projects of community interest, and they might even direct the attention of people who are likely to be working on something in any case in the direction you want it to go. They aren't a way of hiring programmers(not at this size anyway), they are only an added motivation for the already interested.

Does an OS used primarily by a dwindling number of corporate legacy customers, often in semiembedded applications, really have a large enough pool of already interested contributors? The fact that OS/2 is closed isn't an automatic kiss of death for community involvement with a legacy system(just look at Amiga and BeOS); but OS/2 doesn't have anything like the charisma or fanbase, and it is too young and modern to appeal heavily on nostalgic grounds(unlike, say, C64).

Perhaps this will work for them, if so, great; but I have to wonder.

ReactOS, Wine

[Anonymous Coward]

To make matters worse, it is pretty much succeeded by Windows NT, which means any re-developed open source OS/2 clone will be irrelevant, as it will be like ReactOS, but years behind. And let's not forget Wine, of course. I generally love how people can get enthusiastic about vintage operating systems, to the point where they develop clones of them, it's really heart-warming generally, but the OS/2 community I somehow never really understood.

Re:ReactOS, Wine

[Tekoneiric]

Actually the Amiga OS is a bit different from BeOS and OS/2. It did reach a critical mass back in the late '80s and early '90s. Amiga PCs were everywhere and heavily used in the graphics and video industries. It only subsided because the execs at Commodore would rather take trips to the Bahamas than invest in marketing. When Commodore went bankrupt; the video industry was scrambling to locate Amiga 4000s; driving prices up to higher than retail on them. It was years before low priced alternatives were available to them. The Amiga was also at the core of the game industry for years back then for players and developers. Had Commodore Execs been smarter, the computer industry would have been a much different place these days.