Now that OS/2 has officially been withdrawn from sale, and support for the product has also ended - there have been calls to make OS/2 open source for the community to continue development of it for themselves.

osViews.com: The future of OS/2 - Open source or not?:

Back in April of this year, OS/2 website OS2 World started a petition. It’s aim was to get IBM to release OS/2 as an open source piece of software, so that existing users could continue to use and develop it, should they wish. In November, after nearly twelve thousand signatures had been collected, the petition was sent to IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano.

Now, while I have a soft spot for OS/2 and would love to see it live on, I’m not sure if it could be open sourced, even if IBM wanted it so.

Think of the history of OS/2 - it was the child of an unhappy marriage between IBM and Microsoft. After the split, Microsoft took their bat and ball and created Windows, IBM continued to develop OS/2. I don’t know for sure, but I’d take a guess that there is still a lot of proprietary code (possibly even stuff originally developed by Microsoft) in OS/2 - which would make it problematic at best to attempt to open it to the wider community.

I’m happy to be proven wrong here - but I’m not holding my breath!

Look at the trouble IBM is having over Linux because of SCO - they certainly want to be careful not to open themselves to more litigation uneccessarily.

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