Petition To Get OS/2 Open Source 503
Landreth writes "There is currently an ongoing petition taking place at OS2 World to get IBM to open source either the whole part or parts of OS/2 to the community. I would highly encourage the Linux community to take part of this open source petition as well due to the fact there are lots of interesting code base the they could benefit from. To sign the petition: http://www.os2world.com/petition/" Despite the jokes about it, there was some good stuff in OS/2; however, I'd rank the ability to open it up fairly low, since I suspect there's a fair amount of legal restrictions on elements of the code.
I'm In (293) - Many More Needed. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got to say - even if 40% of OS2 is opened up, the benefits to many, many projects could be wide-spread. Further, history shows that IBM is likely to use a GNU compatible license if they open the source at all.
They obviously need more names. Posting it here though will make a nightmare for those who need to clean up the petition.
MSFT will say no (Score:5, Interesting)
Workplace Shell (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows DLL Code (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I would highly encourage the Linux community to take part of this open source petition as well due to the fact there are lots of interesting code base the they could benefit from.
Please remember Linux isn't the only player in the F/OSS world, there are several huge communities, too (although rumor has it they are dying, or something), and the entire open source community might benefit from this.
Cash machines (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS-Win Integration Code Off-Limits? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I remember, not long after Warp For Windows came out, Microsoft came out with Windows 3.11 which fixed a few bugs in 3.1. Oddly enough, it didn't work with OS/2 for Windows. I'm surprised they missed that one. <G>
Re:Workplace Shell (Score:3, Interesting)
Usability wise, OS/2 is a nightmare, but the underlying technology is still unmatched by any OS out there, including the much vaunted OS X.
Re:OS/2 Ahh the memories (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as aGUI based alternative to Linux/BSD, check out ReactOS,/A>. They've made a good eal of progress and I think they will be what some people are looking for in a few years: a free Win32 alternative. [reactos.org]
Not a chance (Score:1, Interesting)
If you have any such magic bits of code, you're better off going after suckers that paid off SCO like this mircosoft partner [eweek.com] or even better these guys [newsfactor.com] who seem to make it a political statement to pay off anyone who threatens anyone with IP (probably at the bidding of their new master who bought them for $2B).
Re:made by M$ (Score:2, Interesting)
BTW I currently work for IBM and was one of the key development managers and tech leads for OS/2 subsystems in those days.
OS/2 Is Old (Score:2, Interesting)
Dare to dream! (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm OS/2 isnt owned by IBM (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless something has changed in the last year or so..
This is a little late... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, it would be nice to see, but way late. We should be at Warp 7 by now. I doubt the OS/2 fanatics will be able to sufficiently play catch-up even if Redmond is open to open sourcing the thing given how many went to Windows or Linux or both. They ain't getting younger and doing an about face in your coding mindset like that might cause a bump in the number of programmers seeking professional psychiatric help.
Re:MS-Win Integration Code Off-Limits? (Score:3, Interesting)
Another thing I miss was OS/2's awesome DOS VDM support. Most of my DOS games played perfectly under OS/2, and through the dummy DOS sound driver could even access the soundcard. I was mightily disappointed when I started playing around with NT 4.0 that it couldn't, and neither could Win2k. I have no idea whether WinXP can, though there is a third party driver that does allow DOS VDM sessions to access the sound hardware. Still, pretty pathetic.
Re:Workplace Shell (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you really think Workplace Shell would have any traction today? Would we rather not push Eclipse as a GUI and client-side object framework, tied to J2EE/WebSphere on the back end? This is essentially the IBM Workplace Client strategy. (Ironic that they reused the name Workplace, isn't it?) And, Eclipse is ALREADY open source.
Re:MSFT will say no (Score:3, Interesting)
That makes no bloody sense. What does Microsoft have to do with an OS that Sun has been developing for over two decades? It's none of their business, and Sun would likely sue if Microsoft got in the way.
OS/2, OTOH, was a joint development project between Microsoft and IBM. They set about developing an ultra-advanced version of Windows that was supposed to be the next in line after Win3.1. However, Microsoft was secretly developing Windows NT and was planning to use OS/2 as a stop-gap measure while they built their true "next OS". Then a couple of MS engineers managed to get protected mode working for the Win3.1 code, and Microsoft shifted development to Win95, thus leaving OS/2 in the dustbin of Microsoft history.
Re:OS/2 Ahh the memories (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:vms (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a project by the name of FreeVMS, but it's not anywhere close to being done, and it's pretty much stagnant now.
Re:MSFT will say no (Score:5, Interesting)
It was pretty cool running all those different systems on one OS though. At one point, I ran Win16/32s apps with OS/2 apps, XFree86 apps, and JAVA apps. Even wrote X11 apps for HP-UX systems on OS/2 and NFS before recompiling on the HP-UX system in the lab for final testing. It was sweet and the WorkplaceOS was supposed to take that concept to the OS level. Kinda like VM-Ware but with host OS and client OS integration.
But all this is and was a theat to the "One Microsoft Way" kind of thinking. To Microsoft, competition is BAD. Very bad. That's why their way of competing is to do anything to prevent the competition in the first place. See DOJ vs MSFT court docs for a small set of examples of this.
LoB
Re:Mod parent UP! Also the Microsoft link .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun too reacted sharply and even critizied linux and mentioned solaris as an excellant alternative. its a fact!
Back on subject....
Microsoft was a core partner with IBM and I even think Microsoft released its own OS/2 version to developers back in the early 90's but never commercially distributed. You can google it if anyone is interested in.
Microsoft more than likely contributed alot of code to IBM and probably owns some percentage of the product.
Remember OS2/NT became WindowsNT after Bill Gates decided to go with their own product.
Microsoft would love to prevent OS/2 from ever going opensource and unlike the SCO case, Microsoft would have a good argument and would probably win.
Doesn't Microsoft also own some unix code from Xenix? I believe some of it ended up in SysV or unixware which is why Novell can not opensource it. MS would probably sue them.
Re:How about other O/Ss too? (Score:1, Interesting)
OS/2 aka eComStation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not going to happen for a long, LONG time... (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, someone forgot to lock an inside key after collecting the previous day money (those machines accept both cards and coins for payment).
The crash was in fact a security ! But seeing about 15 screens goes blank at once is a wonderful sight, indeed (those machines have since been replaced by new, windows powered ones, which routinely go BSOD, but only one at a time)!
Releasing the killer app: Lotus Improv (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, talk about Lotus Improv !
(See also http://www.oreillynet.com/timo.html)
This was a revolutionary spreadsheet concept. Was it actually even to be called a spreadsheet anymore?
Anyway, too new so not popular so dead in the commercial world.
I bet that, as free software, it would have been a killer app (you know, the application that will make free software attractive even to patent lawyers - what kills their jobs - what kills them - hence the name "killer app"), developped and maintained because enough people would love the concept and make it live throughout from childhood to adulthood.
Until the code is erased from all sources, this can still happen.
So, IBM/Lotus, please release the code of Improv (and OS/2) to the people who will make it live.
(Actually, the good thing is that, anyway, someone could make it anyway from scratch, but why reinvent the wheel?)
Re:I'm In (293) - Many More Needed. (Score:3, Interesting)
If someday IBM decides it can't release any OSS products without undercutting it's money-making products, will they still qualify as an OSS poster-child?
If IBM really believed in openness, as they claim they do, they would open all their products up and offer a free license to all their patents.
I don't blame them if they don't (because I believe it's bad for their business), but I can tell the difference betwee principle and PR.
Most ATM's use OS/2. Still want to open source it? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been reported many moons ago the most Automatic Tell Machines (ATM's) use OS/2 as the base platform. I've seen more than one ATM being serviced and seen very OS/2 like screens with diagnostic info.
Do *you* want every 133t h@x0r out there with source code to your neighborhood ATM? If the bank hasn't bothered to move off OS/2, what are the odds they'll patch any holes found by white/grey/black hats?
-MrLogic
Re:MSFT will say no (Score:2, Interesting)
IBM invented plug and play, and OS/2 had it, 'til Microsoft "invented" a method different enough to break IBM's and make theirs the de facto standard.
> limited registry,
IMHO this is a GOOD thing ;)
> limited games support
> less APIs,
How many stable APIs did Win95 have? Are you familiar with all the Workplace APIs? (since Workplace is the descendant of OS/2)
> it's not a moving target and its API very closely resembles Win16 / Win32.
A non-moving target would be a bad thing why, again? ;) The API resemblance to Win16/32 is irrelevant.
Not just icons... (Score:3, Interesting)
There was the famous "drag web pages off of your browser and store them in a folder on your desktop" trick. That might be possible with other OS's now, I dunno.
Shadows of icons would automatically maintain their links to actual programs, even if you dragged the program folder to another directory.
I really can't do it justice -- I never understood the technology well enough to do it justice -- but essentially the workplace shell was a huge folder that opened up, and everything in the UI was a subclass of that folder, and they all "knew" how to work together depending on what you did with them.
Like I said, I really can't do it justice.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MS Code? (Score:3, Interesting)
It does seem that IBM did not do a good job at getting full rights to the code it kept. Supposedly, OS/2 v2.0( the first 32bit OS/2 ) was a rewrite of the 16bit Microsoft code though Microsoft license text always showed up in OS/2.
I've also heard that much of OS/2's kernel is assembly code. OS/2 for the PowerPC was/is portable C code IIRC. But that was pretty slow from what I saw at the 1994 COMDEX show.
What was really lost in the battle with Microsoft was the OpenDoc and WorkplaceShell. Multiple LIVE embeddable objects and "parts"( components ) with non-rectangular window frames were pretty cool. Unfortunately, many didn't recognize what it ment to have more than one embedded "part" live/running in a single document. Those technologies moving forward with Moore's Law, would have had a profound positive impact on the software industry and productivity. It also would have allowed open source projects/developers to compete with large software houses since applications would consist of smaller, replaceable "parts"/components.
IMO.
IIRC, IBM eventually open sourced OpenDoc and SOM but the industry was going nuts over JAVA at that time. Actually, Warp 4.0 and the Apple Mac OS (?) shipped with OpenDoc. Apples CyberDog web browser was an OpenDoc container. Oh, the Bento Filesystem was pretty cool too. It allowed different "parts", or components, to save there data in one file. Kinda like a filesystem within a file but with a ton of APIs for accessing the data in a protected way. These things would have changed how we interact with our DATA on computers. Instead, we still interact with our DATA( a file ) by thinking about the application that's tied to the DATA. OpenDoc enabled mixing of data in a file so you'd open a file based on its rich content instead of saying your "opening an Excel file", or "opening a Word file. These are the things which that kept Bill and Steve up at night. Netscape( the browser ) was/is a shell of what OpenDoc was but it brought about the same kind of attacks from Microsoft.
LoB
Lotus 1-2-3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot is definitely making a difference (Score:4, Interesting)
OS/2 always got hammered because it needed 16MB to be comfortable and those days a server usually had 8MB. I had 8 and I was running a BBS on my PC. It was significantly smoother, never dropped a single package over the modem while I was working on my CAD software (which alone used over 8MB of RAM), constantly swapping in and out. Win3.1 even couldn't handle me moving the mouse with a user downloading. Win95 wasn't an improvement.
Most of the Win95 and OS/2 users were single-task users. It really showed its power when you used it as a server or a real multi-task environment. Later on I ran MUDs and httpd daemons on it and it always performed faster than anything Microsoft could supply. The lack of graphics card driver support really doesn't matter if you are content with a VGA screen, who needs graphics on servers in any case?
Where it failed is the developers. Steve Balmer wasn't shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!" for no reason. IBM's expensive compilers and other suppliers' (i.e., Borland) lack of commitment effectively what killed OS/2. There was a limit on what you really wanted to do with gcc.
IBM and OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
It's great work, but it does have a smell of insincerity.