Author Topic: BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software  (Read 256 times)

Martin Iturbide

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BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software
« on: October 16, 2025, 11:18:20 pm »
Hello

This is my typical brainstorm question where there is no right or wrong answers.

The question is: Which OS/2 software that is close source (Shareware, Freeware, Commercial, Abandonware, etc) do you think it is so good we should offer money to the author to open source it ?

Let's do not worry if it can be possible to open source it, or we have or not the money to offer something, just dream away on the brainstorm.

Regards
« Last Edit: October 17, 2025, 04:43:17 am by Martin Iturbide »
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MPJ

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Re: BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software
« Reply #1 on: October 17, 2025, 07:18:45 am »
Stardock ObjectDesktop, Maul Publisher

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Re: BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software
« Reply #2 on: October 17, 2025, 08:26:54 am »
Hello

This is my typical brainstorm question where there is no right or wrong answers.

The question is: Which OS/2 software that is close source (Shareware, Freeware, Commercial, Abandonware, etc) do you think it is so good we should offer money to the author to open source it ?

Let's do not worry if it can be possible to open source it, or we have or not the money to offer something, just dream away on the brainstorm.

Regards

Interesting. My personal choices:

1 - NotaMusica 2.7 (beta release) - possibly the best music engraving software written for OS/2 PM. Pretty much intuitive once you grasp its working, uses EmTeX as rendering engine so you're pretty sure it just works GOOD. One might expect many things to be added to that, just like it happens on MuseScore.
On a side note, porting MuseScore 4 on OS/2 would be a blast.
2 - MAUL Publisher. DTP is something different from Word processing, even if current software is much more evolved than in the past, but still I'd choose a good DTP software instead of an office suite to write something bigger than an essay or a booklet.
3 - Some good CAD software - even the old PMDraw/2 EWS software would be good to have updated.
4 - CERES SoundStudio - it was a good beginning, it would need a lot of rewriting since it uses the IBM OpenClass library which is rather old and broken here and there, but with a lot of space to improve.
5 - MainActor - THE video editor for OS/2. Pretty useful when I used it, but limited to MMPM/2 architecture.

There's surely a lot more, but I think this would be a good stard.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2025, 04:26:41 pm »
I would love for the Visual SlickEdit to be released. The OS/2 version is soooo old that honestly I can't imagine (even remotely) the possibility of such code base impacting any of their current commercial products.


Thomas M.

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Re: BrainStorm: Best Classic OS/2 Software
« Reply #4 on: October 17, 2025, 07:29:52 pm »
I would like to see Mesa and MoneyPlex being open sourced