Advanced

Campaign to make OS/2 open source begins

Posted by dave on · 2 comments
Inquirer		Mail this story
Print this story

A campaign has kicked off to get the source code for some old operating system, named OS/2, levered open. Spods at OS2 World, the "Internet's premier community resource for OS/2" have launched the petition, worried to the high teeth that tales forecasting the demise of the dazzling OS may turn out to be true.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: News Story; Groups: IBM

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

  Related stories
» More like this

Comments (2)

PaulFerris ·
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 ·
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)?

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post