On 2007-12-08, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/should_ibms_os_2_be_open_sourced
This quote from the article perfectly sums up the OS/2 experience:
At a Comdex in the late 90s, I was in the press room chatting with three
other computer industry journalists who had also written quite a bit
about the OS. Jerry Pournelle wandered by. "Hey, Jerry," said Wayne. "We
were just talking about OS/2." Jerry nodded and said, "Yeah, OS/2. Great
operating system, with only one problemâ??"
And we all shouted in unison, "IBM!"
OS/2 Warp (especially version 4) was a great OS--in 1994. But does it
have anything all that interesting in 2007? Is there anything in it
that would justify the effort it would take IBM to make it open source?
And that would be a fair amount of effort. Even if it turns out that
IBM does own everything in it, they would have to make sure of that,
which would require auditing a lot of code. In general, it is not easy
to open source a large project that was conceived from the beginning to
be closed, and developed for a long time under that assumption.
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