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Should IBM's SOM/DSOM Be Open Sourced?

Posted by kdawson on Sat Feb 09, 2008 11:41 PM
from the what-made-it-great dept.
Operating Systems Software IBM Linux
Esther Schindler sends a note about two journalists for very different publications (herself one of them) urging IBM to open-source, not all of OS/2 — they've consistently refused to do that — but instead one of its most powerful features: SOM, the System Object Model. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes at desktoplinux.com, "IBM, I'm told by developers who should know, still has all of SOM's source code and it all belongs to IBM. It's because IBM doesn't have all the code for OS/2 and some of it belongs to Microsoft that IBM open-sourcing OS/2 has proven to be a futile hope." And Esther Schindler takes the developer angle in a blog post at CIO.com: "Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in? I dare say it could, especially since the code to accomplish that goal was written (and shelved) more than ten years ago. All it takes to make that code available is to ask IBM to release SOM and DSOM as open-source." What are the business issues that would convince IBM to assent?
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Submission: Should IBM's SOM/DSOM be open sourced? by Esther Schindler (16185)
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  • While SOM is very powerful and would of made a great addition to the Linux desktop I think it may be to late now as the common Linux desktop environments are quite entrenched. If only IBM had done this 10 years ago Linux could of had something to set itself apart.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by RobertM1968 (951074)

        Set itself apart from what exactly?... Unix (variations) has used/had/does have SOM...

        You must mean AIX - or you are predicting the future when IBM open sources SOM so your statement comes true...

        and so has Apple, however Steve Jobs ended that "idea" when he returned to Apple...

        You mean Taligent? Which was an IBM & Apple co-project?

        Microsoft has a very similar concept COM+

        You mean MS markets something they pretend is very similar, but any programmer who has used both will tell you they are light years apart, and that no matter how many ++++++++ MS adds to the end of COM, or how many times they change the name of OLE, it still will be light years behind SOM/DSOM.

        You ARE on the right track with all o

        • > You mean Taligent? Which was an IBM & Apple co-project?

          No he was referring to OpenDoc [wikipedia.org] another IBM/Apple co-project which was all based on SOM/DSOM.

          • No he was referring to OpenDoc another IBM/Apple co-project which was all based on SOM/DSOM.

            Oooops! Long night for me... yes I mean OpenDoc. :-) Thanks for correcting that for me.

            -Rob

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jzhos (1043516)
        For those who do not know much about SOM, this wikipedia link compares it to MS COM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model/ [wikipedia.org].

        The following quote supports the parent's point

        The most notable difference between SOM and COM is support for inheritance -- COM does not have any. It might seem odd that Microsoft produced an object library system that could not support one of the most fundamental concepts of OO programming, but they did have their reasons. The main issue is that it is difficult to know where a base class exists in a system where libraries are loaded in potentially random order. COM demands that the programmer specify the exact base class at compile time, making it impossible to insert other derived classes in the middle (at least in other COM libraries).

        SOM instead uses a simple algorithm, looking for potential base classes by following the inheritance tree and stopping at the first one that matches; this is the basic idea behind inheritance in most cases. The downside to this approach is that it is possible that new versions of this base class may no longer work even if the API remains the same. This possibility exists in any program, not only those using a shared library, but problem can become very difficult to track down if it exists in someone else's code. In SOM only solution is extensive testing of new versions of libraries, which is not always easy.

      • If only someone on slashdot could filter out the above stupidity. That's the third article I've read this one. It contributes absolutely nothing to the topic being discussed.

        Anonymous coward: SHUT UP!

  • Who needs the code? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DoofusOfDeath (636671) on Saturday February 09 2008, @11:52PM (#22366756)
    If the great innovation offered by SOM is basically a design pattern or interface technique, do we really need IBM's source code? It seems to me that the great thing about SOM is the idea of how something is done, and that we could pretty quickly write our own implementation of that idea. No?

    • Re:Who needs the code? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RobertM1968 (951074) on Sunday February 10 2008, @12:11AM (#22366886) Homepage Journal

      If the great innovation offered by SOM is basically a design pattern or interface technique, do we really need IBM's source code? It seems to me that the great thing about SOM is the idea of how something is done, and that we could pretty quickly write our own implementation of that idea. No?

      Sadly no - on all counts. In over a decade and a half, no one (but maybe Apple) came close. DSOM/SOM hasn't been worked on in many years, and still, with kludge after kludge, MS cant come close. (some of) The Linux community wanted the WPS open sourced just because of how powerful it was - even though I dont think they even realized that it meant also open sourcing SOM/DSOM. With many attempts at numerous windowing environments, though the Linux community has made both some pretty and some pretty useful windowing environments, they still haven't come close...

      And of course, SOM/DSOM is far more than the WPS... (just a requirement for the WPS to work).

      Also, saying SOM/DSOM is just "the idea of how something is done" is like looking at cars, bicycles, sneakers and skateboards and calling the car engine "an idea of how something moves" - it is far more than that. It is a technology that allows anyone on almost any language, to interact with and integrate with any other device, network resource, app, GUI or OS that is SOM/DSOM enabled. Almost 8? 10? years of little to no development on SOM/DSOM and there is still nothing half as powerful for any PC based operating system. Yeah, MS can keep writing inelegant, bloated (which is a massive understatement when compared to SOMObjects of better capabilities) kludges to achieve some of the functionality on a limited scale...

      SOM/DSOM is truly what most OO programmers truly want - even if they dont know it (which would simply be because they dont understand it, or love VB that much).

      • Linux doesn't need it. It has D-BUS (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Cyberax (705495) on Sunday February 10 2008, @03:14AM (#22367800)
        Linux already has more more powerful D-BUS system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBUS). It's already a base for PolicyKit, HAL daemons, soon it will be used in Upstart and so on.

        It's MUCH MUCH easier to use than COM or SOM. And I still remember working with OpenDoc, so I don't really share good feelings toward SOM.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by DrXym (126579)
          D-Bus is an interprocess communication layer. It doesn't do you any good if you want to embed one visual component inside another, or save a compound document etc. So while it might be great and all, it's only part of the puzzle.

          Anyway, COM isn't hard to learn - it's actually incredibly simple. It's all the OLE2 related stuff that makes a mess of programming visual components. Steer clear of automation, OLE and it's pretty easy to knock up stuff in COM.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sjvn (11568)
          D-BUS is great. D-BUS is wonderful. But, DBUS and SOM do entirely different things. DBUS is meant to be a universal IPC (interprocess communication) mechanism for the Linux desktop. See http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4449390454.html [desktoplinux.com] for more details. SOM's a set of object libraries. You would use them together. In fact, D-BUS, since both the GNOME and KDE communities have embraced its use, would make an ideal interface for SOM. Or, in other words, DBUS would enable applications to more easily access th
          • It can be used for intraprocess communication, but is not really the best tool for it.

            It's much easier to use GObjects or KParts or your favorite component tool. And then use D-BUS to connect all of them together (for drag&drop, for example).

      • Not ever having used SOM I can't compare it directly but it seems to me that the basic idea is to have an object model with a hard to break ABI (i.e. you can add methods without breaking it) and interoperability with other languages.

        Apple has distilled various Objective-C bridging efforts into a common bridge library that is now used by PyObjC (which predates the Apple/NeXT merger) and RubyCocoa and is slated for use with .NET. By virtue of being able to mix Objective-C into a C or C++ file (more or less

      • there are already a lot of object models out there.

        There's various incarnations of CORBA on linux, COM on windows, XPCOM which is used for firefox components, DBUS on Gnome and now KDE.

        Component software is a Good Thing(tm), but all the various implementations essentially do the same thing, which is to allow a cross language interface to be specified in a way that doesn't require wrapper libraries to be written. Also, it is common to include some kind of remote procedure call specification.

        >>In over a

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Simulacrus (1003107)

        It is a technology that allows anyone on almost any language, to interact with and integrate with any other device, network resource, app, GUI or OS that is SOM/DSOM enabled. Almost 8? 10? years of little to no development on SOM/DSOM and there is still nothing half as powerful for any PC based operating system.

        Smalltalk / Squeak has been doing something similar for years. Anything in the system can message anything else. System components / GUI elements can be freely inspected, subclassed, modified - and a

        • Re:Who needs the code? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by cyber-vandal (148830) on Sunday February 10 2008, @06:59AM (#22368668) Homepage
          The trouble with being a habitual criminal is that no-one trusts you ever again. That's where MS = evil comes from and is not likely to stop until they show a consistent period of obeying the law and playing within the rules. Since that is antithetical to the MS corporate culture MS = evil will continue to be held as an opinion irrespective of whether WinXP isn't as god-awful as Win98.
        • Yes, SOM/DSOM had some good points. However, it was also pretty horribly complex. Especially to implement, and even in many ways to use. As a result, almost all other approaches have gone for something simpler rather than trying to recreate it. One of the better ones IMO was NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects (PDO), which was so dirt-simple to use that NeXT engineers developed an infamous reputation in the 90s for writing letters to the editor in response to CORBA articles showing how to do the same thing
  • Srsly, folks. This is IBM we're talking about. They aren't foolish or desperate enough to give up complete control of one of the more useful features of an OS that they've already declined to open up. And MS is involved here... puh-lease. Not gonna happen. Give it up.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by FooAtWFU (699187)
      I dunno. IBM isn't really in the OS market anymore, at least, not the regular mass-produced OS market - the big-machine Z/OS UNIX mainframe stuff and the like is an entirely different matter altogether (and probably wouldn't be substantially affected by such an offering anyway). Giving something like this to Linux+friends, if it helped, could boost Linux and be seriously annoying to Microsoft. And IBM likes Linux - certainly a lot more than they like Microsoft. It could happen. Maybe.

  • IBM Open-sourcing Experience (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fsckr (965056) on Sunday February 10 2008, @12:01AM (#22366814) Homepage
    IBM has been pretty good at taking sucessful closed source technologies and open sourcing them (think eclipse, webspere community ed, jikes and all the patents they've made available to the os community). I think IBM's genius has been in fostering communities to ensure that the technologies are well supported.

    That said, SOM & DSOM are old tech from the dinosaur mainframe days. With so many distributed apps using more flexible interoperating technologies (SOAP, XMP-RPC etc) I don't really think open sourcing D/SOM will make that big of a difference to most new application developers.
    • think eclipse

      I used to work within IBM, and here is the story I got from a senior developer...

      Eclipse was a rogue project within IBM whose purpose was to take down MS Visual Studio 97. When it became obvious that there was absolutely no way that Windows developers who were used to the speed, ease of use, and rather decent integration with Windows of VS97 would shell out money for a Java-based IDE with its own oddball help system, poor integration with the Win32 toolchain, and most importantly was slow as m
      • In what way is Red Hat not FOSS? All the cod in the Red Hat distro - that is why Centos can exist. I think Suse is all FOSS as well.

  • Licensing and open source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dryeo (100693) on Sunday February 10 2008, @12:02AM (#22366822)
    One of the advantages of SOM is that it allows a closed source environment to be extended. Don't like the file dialog, subclass it with a better one. Or a recent example, need transparent png bolted on your 10 year old OS, well create a few new classes and use Cairo to display them. Suddenly you have modern transparent icons, transparent widgets on the desktop etc.
    Unluckily with GPL you can get into issues of whether closed source or just incompatible licensed libraries can be added. One of the ideas behind SOM/DSOM was that anyone could write a DLL and extend the WPS. Now it seems that in free software land you often have to worry about incompatible licenses.
    If IBM ever does open source SOM/DSOM I hope it is with something liberal like the LGPL. Don't have to think about issues with linking and the important source stays open.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by IamTheRealMike (537420)
      I would note that you can do all those things on Windows with COM. In fact that's how transparent PNG support was added to Internet Explorer, and is why you have to invoke them in such a funny way (MS could have done a better job of the IE/COM integration in the images department).

  • Its already there (Score:3, Funny)

    by blackpaw (240313) on Sunday February 10 2008, @12:09AM (#22366870)
    Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in?

    Its called .NET or Mono

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sigzero (914876)
      You have no clue. They are not in the same class at all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by sl0ppy (454532)
      .net and mono are functionally equivalent to a SWIG [swig.org] wrapper - a bit easier to deal with, but similar nonetheless.

      this is a bit different. for one, it allows you to redefine how an API is implemented. imagine a generic database API. instead of programming to a client library, all software can be written to a single standard API that then has its guts replaced with a simple call to be database specific. need to move from mysql to postgres and have 30-40 different maintenance programs and scripts that are

  • It's the best outcome (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jsse (254124) on Sunday February 10 2008, @12:37AM (#22367042) Homepage Journal
    The good things about OS/2 I described before [slashdot.org] is blessed by the wonderful SOM. I really can't tell you all the good things about SOM here, but during the time I wrote apps at IBM in C Set, SOM really save us a lot of time and efforts.

  • Open Source should be the default "archive" choice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TakeyMcTaker (963277) on Sunday February 10 2008, @12:47AM (#22367098)
    Ignore IBM and OS/2 and everything, just for a second, and review this hypothetical situation on its own:

    A Big Computer Giant (BCG) purports to be very Open Source friendly. They defend OSS products and licenses, even using their own lawyers, and make a lot of money using/supporting OSS, in their own hardware, and in huge consulting contracts. It turns out they have this collection of source code that they aren't really using anymore, and they have complete rights to at least part of it. Let's just say they only have 2 real options when archiving the source code they own the rights to:

    1. Keep it locked in some internal media or shelf, never to see the light of day, unless an internal developer finds it interesting and digs it up for an internal-only project. The internal project may never see the light of day either.

    2. Put it on the Internet, and Open Source License it, preferably with an existing OSI license. Not only could the online repository be considered the source "archive", but it also leaves the possibility of growing a redundant, living archive. The source could then be provided by various OSS repositories and mirror hosts.

    I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but shouldn't #2 always be the default, or at least the first option considered? Even if you're not an OSS nut (like me), you have to admit the hypothetical company looks pretty darn hypocritical if they don't choose #2, when given the choice, early and often.

    So am I using a hypothetical situation to say that IBM (BCG) is a big hypocrite if they DON'T release and apply an OSI License to SOM/DSOM source, ASAP? Why yes I am! How could you tell?...
    • It's not hypocritical because they didn't tell other people that they must open source everything. Also, you are somewhat familiar with the logistics involved by projects, archives, etc. You might consider that open sourcing is far from a 'default' choice, there are plenty of considerations:

      1. it takes time to look over something to make it ready to see the light of day. You have a reputation to uphold.
      2. you might want to make money off the software, now or in the future. as much as i love and support an
    • Because in real world companies exist to make money, not please OSS crowd.
        • And how many %% of OSS crowd really care about OS/2? I don't care, for instance. It's just small %% who remembers what OSS is and wants its source. You can't please everybody with finite resources.
          As another poster in this sub-thread said, open sourcing any code isn't free at all.
    • Releasing internal code as open-source has many costs associated with it, from software packaging issues to legal ones. Unless it's clearly a case where that code has some value to a larger community, paying those "free the code" costs may have no payback for the company. It's completely reasonable to say that the default position is "do nothing", which also costs nothing, and only consider the costs of releasing as open-source when there's a demonstrated need or desire to use the code outside of the comp
    • Remember when Netscape put Communicator source on the internet, and everyone just whined how it didn't compile and how useless it was?

      And that's when Netscape was the most popular browser, not some 12 year old abandonware desktop middleware that nobody used in the first place.

      I don't think anyone active in the OSS desktop community wants a bunch of old unpopular OS2 crap. If anything, they have too many duplicate component models and they need to start standardizing, not add a new one.
    • They would have to check the code. Maybe the responsible developers have left the company, or maybe they are on an active project. It would take time to assemble the original team (or what is left of it) and ask them: Do we have the exclusive rights to this code? And if they were unsure they would loose even more time trying to find out. Time is money. If those people get decent wages it could be a lot of money. If they were working on important projects IBM was to earn a lot of money for they would loose t

  • Of Course! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tragek (772040) on Sunday February 10 2008, @01:14AM (#22367246) Journal
    All should be open source. Source should never be hidden. It violates all ethos, it violates all truth, it violates my first GPL right to see the code!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What colour is the sky in your world?

      • What colour is the sky in your world?
        Why, I can easily recompile the sky to be whatever color I want it to be, now that you mention it.

        • Why, I can easily recompile the sky to be whatever color I want it to be, now that you mention it.

          Not unless you're using Firmament Beta 12. The latest stable release only supports Skies with 4 bits per pixel.

          • Ah, but he's got the source so he can modify to run 16 bits per pixel - just needs one hell of a CPU and graphics card, and if you do a poor job your sky ends up panicking.
    • Dude, you remind me of a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap label:

      Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Balanced food for mind-body-soul-spirit is our medicine! Full-truth our God, half-truth our enemy, hard work our salvation, unity our goal, free speech our weapon!

  • Business issues for open-sourcing SOM/DSOM (Score:4, Funny)

    by Duke (23059) on Sunday February 10 2008, @01:50AM (#22367414)

    What are the business issues that would convince IBM to assent?
    I can think of three:
    1. That it would hurt Microsoft
    2. That it would hurt Microsoft
    3. That it would hurt Microsoft
  • I would ask the question of what SOM/DSOM would bring to the party, when much of that technology went into making CORBA [wikipedia.org]. CORBA is here now, has multiple implementations, both commercial and open (source and beer).

    The only thing I can point to is GUI components, but those were either tied to a specific implementation (OS/2) or to an additional frameword (OpenDoc) and I am not sure they would be of much value.

  • SOM = CORBA 1.0 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by micromuncher (171881) on Sunday February 10 2008, @02:54AM (#22367712)
    SOM implements a subset of the CORBA specification. Other technologies implement CORBA. Some already are open source (MICO). So... consider porting to another ORB.

    And for the person who mentioned Apple... Apple implemented a subset of SOM specifically for OpenDoc. Though highly cool at the time, it was too castrated to be useful and has been surpased by other technologies for robustness (like J2SE/J2EE). Don't forget cool stuff like Spring... Lots has changed in 10 years.
  • Will that source code really be useful? A component like this may be completely useless in any other environment or maybe it can be seen as a curiosity and nothing more.

    Some of the ideas may survive in new solutions, but it can be a really bad idea to take this out of concept and trying to graft it upon a different platform. The amount of work involved for that operation may exceed the amount of work to re-create the functionality without source.

  • SOM, COM, CORBA are all much of a muchness. They let you define APIs to objects and interfaces in language neutral IDL, generate stubs that you implement and let you call those objects from other libraries, processes or even machines.

    If Linux really wants language neutral interface bindings, it already has it. There are numerous CORBA implementations, idl compilers and so on. For example GNOME offers ORBit (a Corba implementation) for embedding UI components via Bonobo. Bonbo appears deprecated and is bei

  • As other pointed out: there are enough CORBA implementations out there. The only advantage of SOM was that ist offered igh performance in an non distributed environment while beeing compatible with it's distributed peer DSOM. But even that is not so cool any more.

    What was realy cool was the only real application build with the SOM: The Workplace Shell. Neither KDE nor GNOME can to what the WPS could do.

  • You Don't Want It (Score:5, Informative)

    by scherrey (13000) on Sunday February 10 2008, @09:03AM (#22369242) Homepage
    I did two contracts with IBM in the early 90's, one on the OS/2 2.1 change team. In both I "got" to deal with SOM and its implementation source code. It's a giant nasty C macro & function pointer hack. OS/2's Workplace Shell was very cool but the underlying implementation was pretty nasty stuff. One of my fixes was dealing with how slow it was populating icons in folders. SOM is a good example of the "Prototry" anti-pattern where one does an initial implementation of a cool trick then ends up shipping & extending it rather than ever bothering to architect it right in the first place. I can understand why IBM doesn't want this source out in public. FWIW - I also had to deal with some of the Microsoft source code, especially device driver stuff. Was the worse C code I've ever seen in production...

    If you like SOM & Workplace Shell features you'll find it far easier to implement on top of Qt/KDE or wxWidgets or a smart functional integration of some Boost library features & a GUI than you'd ever have hopes of getting that code to work with anything modern or useful today. I loved OS/2. Borland had a Beautiful C++ compiler for it and CSet/2 was one of the better standards compliant compilers at the time as well. They're all bit rot by now though. Appreciate the memories but let this one die.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Knuckles (8964)
      Linux Desktop environment use bonobo implementing some of its services to achieve reusability and that too is not universal. (Gnome uses it).

      No, Bonobo failed and is being phased out: http://live.gnome.org/Bonobo [gnome.org]

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