Users' group urges IBM to make OS/2 open source

Stockholm (Sweden) - One of the last active OS/2 users’ groups anywhere in the world has announced an initiative to garner support for petitioning IBM to release components of its long-neglected OS/2 operating system into the open source community.

Last week, IBM reaffirmed the company’s 2000 decision to terminate free support for the latest and last versions of the operating system in December 2006, and also removed some OS/2 support resources from the IBM Web site. The move, Tom’s Hardware Guide has been told, came as no shock to American users of OS/2. Although its place on the desktops of PCs - such as it was - has effectively been eliminated, OS/2 actually continues to receive wide support from financial institutions worldwide, which continue to implement the system in ATMs and kiosks. A commercial implementation of OS/2 called eComStation , jointly developed with IBM, is produced today by Serenity Systems, and marketed toward customers who need a way to implement modern Internet communications capability on older platforms, such as first-edition Pentiums.

So OS/2 is not dead, but the Swedish OS2World users group is concerned that it might not survive on life support. Calling last week’s IBM announcement a "funeral notice," the group released a statement with an accompanying press release, urging OS/2 supporters to convince IBM that releasing as much of OS/2’s source code as possible would best serve the interests of its customers. "Making OS/2 Open Source will benefit all IBM customers that had invested in this OS," the statement says. "Customers that are willing to continue using OS/2 will get the benefits of an open OS that will be continuously developed by individual developers and/or software companies, their ownership fees will decrease and they will have the enhanced security of an OS that will continue to be relevant due to the open-ended nature of open source (following the BSD and Linux examples)."

But as the release itself acknowledges, IBM may not be able to simply make the operating system a public works project even if it wanted to. Bob St. John, Serenity Systems’ Director of Business Development, told Tom’s Hardware Guide today that "OS/2 was a joint development project with Microsoft, and includes software acquired from other companies and organizations."

Esther Schindler, currently editor of InformIT and formerly one of the founders of the Phoenix OS/2 Society, told us today, "Everybody points to Microsoft as the difficulty in making OS/2 open source. Microsoft is only part of the issue." Schindler told us that Corel may also have some stake in OS/2. During the heyday of Windows 95, Micrografx, acquired by Corel in 2001, worked with IBM to develop what it called Mirrors - a software development kit that enabled ports of programs such as WordPerfect 5.1 from the Win32 to OS/2 Warp platform.

"That doesn’t mean there aren’t pieces that could be pried out," Schindler said, pointing to one example with ObjectRexx, a scripting language derived from REXX, which was developed by IBM originally for mainframes in 1979, and implemented in OS/2. This year, the Open ObjectRexx project was initiated as a result of IBM’s decision. Serenity System’s St. John suggested the operating system’s Workplace Shell could conceivably be released, "which is not part of OS/2," he said. "Rather, it was independently developed within IBM and applied to OS/2." St. John also suggested the operating system’s TCP/IP stack could be of some use in the open source community, as well as being "helpful to keeping OS/2 viable."

The question is, posed St. John, whether IBM has an interest in seeing the viability of OS/2 be maintained, even if someone else ends up being responsible for it. St. John was a former IBM employee, who suggests the answer to that question "may change depending on who is asked and when they are asked."

As for other elements of the operating system, Schindler said, it may not be IBM executives who make the final decision about their fate. "IBM’s attitude has always been to let the lawyers make decisions," she said. "There’s all sorts of decisions made with regard to OS/2, because there were huge companies that they made agreements with."

"I think it’s a question of motivation," added Schindler, "and...what’s the benefit for the company [and] for the customer base. And when they think ’customer base,’ they are not thinking about the individual user. That’s one of the biggest issues IBM has always had : They keep trying to market to an end user, and the only way they’ve ever been successful with that is with ThinkPad. They’ve never successfully figured out how to market software."

Schindler believes there may be OS/2 supporters who feel vindicated by the recent settlement of IBM’s ongoing dispute with Microsoft, and may be wondering what’s the payoff for them. Meanwhile, she said, IBM may assess the impact of a move upon what it perceives to be OS/2’s customer base - not individual supporters, but the banks and insurance companies who still maintain an investment in the operating system.

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