Linked by Michael Reed on Thu 7th Feb 2008 17:21 UTC
Last month, IBM made an announcement that put an end to any hope of an open source OS/2. Responding to requests from an online community that had previously collected 11,600 signatures in support of its cause, the company confirmed that they would not be releasing the source code of their OS/2 operating system. I used OS/2 as my main operating system for about four years, and unlike some former users, my reaction to the news sits somewhere between disinterest and relief.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
IMHO, the Workplace Shell (WPS) GUI is the only part of OS/2 worth bringing into the modern age. And I'm only talking about how the WPS worked in general, not a feature or API compatible clone. Other than the SOM's ability to let you insert classes into the inheritance hierarchy, I think there are much easier methods and better toolkits to use to build such a GUI today.
A big problem of course is that relatively few people have actually used the WPS and don't understand what was special about it. Maybe IBM could give it away as closed source, but I think that would tick off Serenity.
Perhaps IBM could release for free all developer and user documentation of WPS, so prospective GUI designers could get a better idea of what the WPS did. There's some docs and a conceptual demo (of CUA) out there here and there, but it's all rotting away with time.