IBM Won't Open-Source OS/2

wikinerd writes "Following an online petition in November 2007 by members of an OS/2 online community to open-source OS/2, IBM answered by sending a letter via FedEx making it clear that OS/2 is going to remain closed-source, citing business, technical, and legal reasons. An earlier petition in 2005 that had attracted over 11,000 signatures met a similar response. Both petition letters to IBM Corp. can be viewed at the OS2World.com library. The End of Support period for OS/2 passed by in December 2006, and the given IBM's response the future for OS/2 doesn't look bright, unless re-implementation projects such as Voyager or osFree attract the necessary critical mass of operating system developers."

Re:Nigger Day is Almost Over

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Ron Paul, and I approve this message.

it seems pretty important to note

[deft]

"IBM answered by sending a letter via FedEx."

It was then opened with a #2 pencil, and read sitting at a desk by office depot. They examined the contents of the letter while sipping on some folgers coffee.

I just thought we should have all of the important facts of the story here.

They won't open-open source it, eh?

[iminplaya]

Then let's claim eminent domain. We can have the property condemned as a public hazard... oh, wait...maybe we should save that for windows :-)

Re:It's just interesting...

[MeltUp]

Well, we ordered some trial CD's from IBM a while back, and they arrived yesterday. They came in a box. A cardboard box of about 40x40x50 cm (that's about 15x15x20 inch). It contained a lot of packaging paper, and there was a smaller box in it. In that box where some CD's, and a 300 page book titled "license". We needed just one CD. Just one. Worst part: I'm not making any of this up. So I'm betting on #2 as well.

Hmmm...

[Foerstner]

In early '93 IBM Germany started a big campaign to get OS/2 to the public. You could get OS/2 2.0 for a more or less symbolic sum (I don't remember how much it was, but quite inexpensive), with a cheap upgrade to OS/2 2.1 coming out shortly after it. And it really rocked. Then Warp (3.0) came, even better. But then the Internet came. For Windows (3.x) at the time you had to use Trumpet Winsock, which sucked but at least was there. Warp had a dial-up client, but no real LAN TCP/IP functionality. The TCP/IP stack had to be purchased separately. Expensively. But even if you wanted to, there was no way to get it: IBM sold its OS/2 add-ons only through their local partners, which just were not interested to send some guy who didn't want to purchase an entire network from them a quote over a one software package for a measly 300 EUR.

I suspect that OS/2 failed was that resellers apparently priced it in a currency that was not in circulation at the time...

It's because...

[khelms]

OS/2 contains proprietary Unix code!