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jmase:

--- Quote from: Roderick Klein on January 23, 2025, 12:19:13 am ---
--- Quote from: jmase on January 21, 2025, 09:48:19 pm ---The problem as far as I know is not Microsoft but all the other companies IBM used as contractors.
Many of them don't even exist any more so finding out who owns rights might be a nightmare.

When the OS/2 kernel source was leaked (20 years ago?) the people I talked to told me they were able to build and use everything that was there. They also told me that according to text in the code there was a lot of subcontractors that kept their copyright. It was not like a Linux kernel where everything has the same license.

If IBM still have some big customers with OS/2 installations they support then they definitely have the code and the tools to build it. Not that many people know how to build it though.

Yes, the divide between kernel and device drivers makes it easier to support more modern hardware. Less stuff in the kernel makes it easier to expand it from the outside.

But in the end, without open source it will fail, it's quite amazing that modern CPU's still supports 30+ years old code. The only way to save anything imho is to use the Linux kernel and build a "personality" on top. But there are no resources nor business case any more.

--- End quote ---

I can provide some clarity. IBM and Microsoft jointly development OS/2 and. Later from about OS/2 2.1 IBM continued the development of OS/2 without Microsoft.
I talk to some people who used todo work for IBM (like a company in Latvia that wrote part of the USB stack). Even they did not get certain sources.
At the time I understood Scitech (who worked on Scitech Display Doctor) also did not get some of the GRADD sources they requested.

The gist was that IBM has always been strict on on Intellectual Property. When I worked at Mensys, Serenity Systems had a ASL contract for eComStation. This is effectively a kind of OEM agreement for OS/2 (binary access). It was looked into if we could get access to the source under IBM supervision. Well that was not possible. What might have been possible was a so called TCO contract. Uhuuu that was in my recollection not something the funds where available for. I seem to recall that this was just a copy of the sources for OS/2 within IBM. What other rights
that may have given I have forgotten this is more then 20 years ago :-)

From what I heard over the years is that around 1996 when IBM started reducing OS/2 funding internally it seems somewhere some of the OS/2 sources where leaked. From what I understand however not everything of OS/2 was leaked.   But I have no direct evidence of this leak.

Roderick

--- End quote ---

Sounds resonable, 30 years ago open source was not an important concept and things ran on the users computer. Was much harder to protect your software. Today much/most? stuff runs on internet  where its impossible to get the source (C#, Java, PHP or what ever) and software are for hire, not for owning.

About the leak, the person that "put he's teet" into it was after some work able to build the kernel. All or most command line tools were there. PM was mostly complete iirc but no Object Desktop and no networking. This fits with IBM and IP protection. Networking was build by another part of IBM and possibly Object Desktop also, so the kernel and PM team might not have had any access to that code.

I dont know who the leaker was, my best contact was an ex Lotus employee who had access to internal documents and Lotus stuff, but not OS/2 code. But I knew who worked and built with the leak. This is all 25-30 years ago.

The only thing I have left from that time is the programs I developed, their source was put on hobbes a long time ago. My oldest backup I saved is from 2008 and then I was forced into Windows.

I'm proud to be a Linux users :-)

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