I wonder if this is even possible

Story: Campaign to make OS/2 open source beginsTotal Replies: 1
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PaulFerris

Apr 26, 2005
5:13 AM EDT
The problems are many -- a lot of this code was written by Microsoft and as much as IBM has the rights to it -- they probably also have shared rights with Microsoft (Speculation_mode=1).

But it would be nice.

still, I have to wonder if it would be all that relevant, given the advancement of a lot of the stuff that we call an OS today. I'm picturing people porting things like GNOME and KDE to it, all of the GNU stuff and so on -- and then someone going "I'm using OS/2? Wow! I thought I was using Linux!" Then the reply. "Well, it's the OS/2 kernel -- the rest of it's the same."

phsolide

Apr 26, 2005
8:53 AM EDT
At a guess, porting all the GNU stuff to OS/2 would take quite a bit of effort - like the NT designers, they failed to learn the lessons of Unix, Mach and Plan 9 with respect to process creation. In short, OS/2 doesn't have a fork()/exec() combo, it has some special purpose "Spawn" like functionality that means that corner cases become very difficult. What is it about OS and "object oriented" designers that makes them introduce abstraction induced complexity (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/keppel93managing.html)?

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