OS/2 Community Tries Bounty System

Grayskull writes "The OS/2 and eComStation community are trying to get open source software ported to that platform by opening bounties and allowing people to chip in with prize money. Currently the most important open bounties are Java 6 port, Icon routines in OS/2, VirtualBox port, Extend multimedia and OpenWengo ports."

Bounties?

Not even Boba Fett would do /that/ job for /that/ bounty.

Open source the OS

And more people will port Open Source software to it.

Re:Open source the OS

It can't be done. The OS in encumbered by crap from Microsoft and COUNTLESS other contributors. Sun had quite a time releasing Solaris as open-source, and they owned almost all of it.

Not the whole OS, but large subsystems can be

What IBM could do:

1) Open-source the code it owns

2) Binary-blob all non-royalty-bearing code it doesn't own.

3) Sell the complete package including royalty-bearing code for the cost of royalties plus a small markup to cover business expenses.

4) Repeat for older versions

They've already all but open-sourced JFS. If memory serves, the version of JFS in the final version of Warp Server had much the same code as the version that found its way into Linux.

ReactOS, Wine

To make matters worse, it is pretty much succeeded by Windows NT, which means any re-developed open source OS/2 clone will be irrelevant, as it will be like ReactOS, but years behind. And let's not forget Wine, of course. I generally love how people can get enthusiastic about vintage operating systems, to the point where they develop clones of them, it's really heart-warming generally, but the OS/2 community I somehow never really understood.

Re:ReactOS, Wine

Actually the Amiga OS is a bit different from BeOS and OS/2. It did reach a critical mass back in the late '80s and early '90s. Amiga PCs were everywhere and heavily used in the graphics and video industries. It only subsided because the execs at Commodore would rather take trips to the Bahamas than invest in marketing. When Commodore went bankrupt; the video industry was scrambling to locate Amiga 4000s; driving prices up to higher than retail on them. It was years before low priced alternatives were available to them. The Amiga was also at the core of the game industry for years back then for players and developers. Had Commodore Execs been smarter, the computer industry would have been a much different place these days.

OS/2 was the only acceptable option

I'm just chiming from my observations but wasn't OS/2 great for digital phone systems in the 90s and early 2000s before Linux products took the crown? This is of course well before VOIP.

Of course. Heck, OS/2 is still in use in a lot of ATMs, voice mail systems, and so on today, although it's being phased out due to lack of support. But there are ATM's in my area that I know are running OS/2. Our Nortel Norstar voice mail unit at work runs OS/2. In the 1980s and 1990s, OS/2 was very commonly used when you wanted to embed a general-purpose computer system into an "appliance" scenario. That's because it was, to a large extent, the only acceptable option.

Consider, it's 1990, and you want to build some kind of computerized "appliance". Maybe it's a voice mail system, or a bank ATM, or an electronic message board, or whatever. You want to use a general-purpose computer, because that lowers costs and enables third-party "layered product" options. GP hardware is cheaper, software development on a GP platform is easier (since the test target can be the same as the development environment), and there's a bigger third-party community to tap.

So what are your choices? Linux doesn't exist yet. Commercial Unix platforms (SGI/Irix, SunOS, HP-UX, DEC/Ultrix, etc.) are very expensive. BSD is tied up in legal wranglings, and support for commodity micros (IBM-PC, Mac) is limited at the time. DOS barely provides disk services and is useless for everything else, so you'd practically have to write your own OS. MS Windows runs on top of DOS and is basically just a GUI -- inappropriate for most embedded applications -- and has stability issues. Win NT doesn't exist yet. Xenix is a joke. SCO Unix is painfully clunky and hideously expensive.

And then there is OS/2. It's a preemptive multitasking, protected memory OS. It runs on IBM-PC-compatible computers, the platform with the biggest market presence and the most third-party support -- and also the cheapest hardware. It's from IBM, the single biggest name in computing. IBM and Microsoft both say it's the wave of the future. It's relatively inexpensive when purchased in bulk. Seems like a no brainer, right?

Obviously, looking back with 20/20 hindsight today, OS/2 seems like a strange choice, but at the time, it made perfect sense.

Re:Open source the OS

Odin [wikipedia.org] tries to, but the project's been moribund for about ten years.

Qutecom instead of Openwengo

Openwengo is dead, it's now called Qutecom [qutecom.org]. Also I'm wondering whether Ekiga is not much mature, especially now version 3.00 is around the corner.

Team OS/2!

OS/2! Named after the number of users remaining!

Re:Team OS/2!

Ahh show some respect. :)

Long before there was talk of Linux supplanting Windows, it was OS/2.

I was one of them, from version 2 through Warp 4. Let the Star Trek puns rain down on me for that one! :)

Take care all.

Just my .02 worth :)

What!

Someone is still using OS/2? Perhaps there should also be bounties for porting software to Win 95 & NT 4.0 and Linux kernel v1.0...

Re:What!

There are several embedded systems till using OS/2. One of the biggest is ATM machines, new ones too.

My bank just installed a load of brand new machines, all running OS/2.

Re:What!

Yeah, I can see a huge bright future for ATMs running Java and GIMP and Firefox and Chrome.

What does OS/2 offer today?

I used OS/2 Warp a long time ago. It was good, in its day. But why do people still use it late 2008?

Is it love?

Are there any technical advantages?

If it is because of a key legacy application instead of getting stuff ported to OS/2 maybe that application should get ported to the other OSs?

Re:What does OS/2 offer today?

> Try this with Linux or Windows. Keep a link to a file on your desktop, now drop down to the command line and rename the original file. Used to break Linux, it might try to search now, Windows will try a search if it's similar. OS/2 has no such problem, the 2 are automagically linked.

Um, you can do that in Linux with a simple hard link instead of a symbolic link. You could do that in Unix with hard links before symbolic links were even invented and before there was such as thing as Linux, MacOS, OS/2, or MS-Windows.

Not very bountiful

How hard up for money do you need to be to port GTK+ 2.x to OS/2 for $ 30?

I'm not sure that this is the place for bounties..

Looking at the list of bounties, I was struck by their paltriness(and, in certain cases, their complete implausibility, "Oh, sure, I'm sure I've got the Skype sourcecode sitting around here somewhere, definitely worth 130 bucks."). I find it difficult to believe that they'll get too many people to work on a closed and rather necrotic OS for that kind of money.

Bounties make a certain amount of sense as a means to reward the efforts of people who work on projects of community interest, and they might even direct the attention of people who are likely to be working on something in any case in the direction you want it to go. They aren't a way of hiring programmers(not at this size anyway), they are only an added motivation for the already interested.

Does an OS used primarily by a dwindling number of corporate legacy customers, often in semiembedded applications, really have a large enough pool of already interested contributors? The fact that OS/2 is closed isn't an automatic kiss of death for community involvement with a legacy system(just look at Amiga and BeOS); but OS/2 doesn't have anything like the charisma or fanbase, and it is too young and modern to appeal heavily on nostalgic grounds(unlike, say, C64).

Perhaps this will work for them, if so, great; but I have to wonder.

Linux ate OS/2 market share IMO

I was a very fanatical OS/2 user. Not fanatical in a zealotish way but fanatical in that I liked doing all I needed on my PC using OS/2. Some minor issues which couldn't be done were usually easily solved when opening up OS/2 Windows. Another issue is that I actually paid for my sofware. And OS/2 knew some great software packages! If you like GQView these days; I was using something very similiar long before we even heard from Gnome and KDE.

But it became awfully tricky when IBM dropped support for OS/2 and eventually I made the jump fully to Linux. Right now I'm very happy with Ubuntu using a KDE desktop. And the fact that it doesn't have to cost me much is naturally a very welcome benefit as well.

Now, this was years ago. I sometimes try to install my Warp and Merlin CD's in some kind of virtual machine but mostly to no avail (I did got Warp running though). However, I have tried a few of the ComStation live cd's to see what it was all about. And quite frankly; it doesn't manage to impress me one bit. Sure; its a nice revival of the old OS/2 but its main problem (IMO ofcourse) is that it didn't go along with recent developments but instead got stuck somewhere in the last century.

Now; bear with me. I can understand that the developers can only do so much with it. But it would have been a lot better if they would have tried to utilize other people's researches and developments as well. OS/2 had some very powerfull desktop enhancers. Some of those even managed to build an entire business out of their single product because.. it actually sold (I bought several copies myself as well). But.. None of that on eComstation. The interface is basically the same as what we were used to, but which most of us have most likely outgrown.

So instead of wasting money on projects like these I'd think that money would be better put into OS development. But even that might not be enough to get back much of the marketshare. Lets face it; Linux has ate up a lot of marketshare. I sure wouldn't even consider going back anymore. So my stance on this? "Too little, too late", even though I admire the effort.

They should port the OS/2 API to Linux

I used to be a OS/2 user, but I stopped about 4 years ago. I sympathize with the OS/2 community, because it was my geek "home" for a while, but they're going about it all wrong. I tried to convince them a long time ago, but they never listened.

The OS/2 kernel is seriously outdated. Hardware support is minimal, and the kernel itself is just dated. It's mostly 16-bit. So there's no reason to keep it. A few people insist that the OS/2 kernel is "nicer" or "better" than the Linux kernel is some way, but these people don't know anything about kernels. It's a stupid argument.

The OS/2 community should port the OS/2 API to Linux. This will allow them to run the WPS (the illustrious GUI that OS/2 users rave about) and every other OS/2 application. This would be a one-time effort, because the API is stable. It hasn't been updated in almost 10 years. Not only that, but it's very well documented

Instead, these guys keep trying to port Linux applications to OS/2. If every OS/2 developer dropped what he was doing and worked on porting the OS/2 API, they'd be done in about a year. They would never have to ask for any more help ever again. The user base would actually grow, even. They'd be able to use all of their applications forever, even on newer hardware. Device support would never be a problem. Even businesses that are based on OS/2 would start moving to Linux. It would be win-win for everyone.

In fact, the WPS might even become quite popular. Someone might try to make an open source version of it, and it might even become a replacement GUI for Linux, competing with Gnome and KDE.

NEWs?

Some of these bounties were created in 2005.

Re:Or...

Exactly. OS/2 is dead, guys. Where have you been?

OS/2 has all kinds of really neat features. In many ways, it's still a signpost of things to come. Unfortunately, it's all built on top of a kernel that incorporates all the mistakes/oversights of early 80s programming techniques.

Re:Or...

I remember when I first fired up the Workplace Shell in v. 2.1. Everything was interconnected, and theoretically would Just Work--hell it worked better than Windows 3.11. But the problem was that everything was dependent upon "and ifs".

Want to print a document? Just drag its icon to the printer icon and if your word processor is written right, the document will print without having to start your word processor.

Don't like the color of your terminal window? Drop a color from the color palette to the window and if its written right, it'll not only change to the color you want, but the program will remember!

That's just scratching the surface; hpfs, multimedia, Christ, even the GNU tools all ran under OS/2 (heck, that's how I discovered tcsh, which has been my command line shell for longer than I've known *nix!).

Of course history chose the winner. The WPS was the Win 95 shell done right. It took MS, what, 6 years? to get Windows to the stability of OS/2. Alas, OS/2 is now a corpse. I understand it's still being used, but not to the extent that it could have been. OS/2 was elegant, and Win 95 brutish--having the feel of someone trying to forge the Mona Lisa with a Crayola. Of course, time marches on, and I was able to dodge the Microsoft tax all throughout college by using Linux, which has slowly pulled itself up to start feeling vaguely like the WPS. KDE 4.2 and its promise of further integration of ... stuff has my curiosity piqued. You're right, though, OS/2 is dead, and people should be looking to migrate their software to something a little more modern.

Re:Truly hopeless

Thank you, I'm going to have to scrub my brain with bleach now.

Re:Truly hopeless

They can't open source it. It's encumbered.

Are we still talking about OS/2 or his grandmother?