Look the latest Haiku OS post on their site 2014-10-10:
The Haiku project is participating in this year's "Semester of Code" (SoC) of the European VALS project. The SoC is similar to Google's GSoC, but without the financial incentive and more emphasis on the educational side.
Its goal is to connect higher education students with open source projects to introduce them to the cooperative nature of working within a group on a bigger project. For Haiku, besides potentially extending its feature set, it's another opportunity to spark the interest of new, eager developers with a chance to gain future regular contributors.
ReactOS is at least tried to do something different:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thorium/thorium-core-cloud-desktop
On the other hand:
- "We don't have a future" is not an strategy or an idea.
- "Why bother" is not an strategy or an idea.
- "Be realistic, we are doomed and our destiny is to switch platform" is not an strategy or an idea.
It would be great if we could get students to do semothing with eCS. And I do agree that "we don't have a future" is not exactly a constructive attitude. The reality is that indeed the platforrm, pc, that our OS runs on, is rapidly changing and indeed, disappearing. So, it will take more than an open source clone to preserve OS/2. It will need to be adapted to more modern hardware and ways of using computers/hardware. I personally don't see the desktop disappearing very soon, but it -is- disappearing rapidly in private use. Eventually, OS/2 will die. As has DOS, Amiga, Commodore 64. And as Windows will, and as Android will. Some os's are practically stillborn, like Sailfish (sadly). It's life. Nothing is forever. I'll leave it to Frank to switch the light off, but after he has done so, the lights of my hard drive will probably light up the room a few times more until the hardware finally gives up the ghost).
Strategies... I actually have no idea what it will take to keep OS/2 alive as long as possible, or to make it evolve eevn into something nw and modern. Drivers to keep it running -now-, for sure. A new approach, open source replacement would certainly extend the life of it. I do agree with Martin that development of one does not preclude the development of the other. It is merely a matter of attracting people to spend time on it. How to do that? Maybe we van learn from Haiku and similar. But it won't be easy to convert an OS from a previous age of computing into an interesting project for students.....