Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 21st Jan 2008 23:33 UTC
IBM pretty much slammed the solid oak door on open sourcing os/2. "As stated in our response to your September 2005 letter we have considered the positioning of os/2 and open source several times in the past, and for a variety of business, technical, and legal reasons we have decided to not pursue any os/2 open source projects."
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You'd be surprised if you saw the source. Half of OS2 is written in x86 assembler. Probably around 2M lines of it. The x86 C compilers weren't very good back then and a decent programmer could easily beat the compiler. RAM was a precious commodity and a lot of work went into reducing the memory footprint. It took about two days to do a complete build. MS didn't even have a network connection to IBM, we mailed floppies to exchange code.
Member since:
2005-07-06
You'd be surprised if you saw the source. Half of OS2 is written in x86 assembler. Probably around 2M lines of it. The x86 C compilers weren't very good back then and a decent programmer could easily beat the compiler. RAM was a precious commodity and a lot of work went into reducing the memory footprint. It took about two days to do a complete build. MS didn't even have a network connection to IBM, we mailed floppies to exchange code.