Hi Larry, welcome.
From a Business point of view, eComStation is being sold to the companies that requires to run OS/2 legacy application, and that will be too expensive to migrate to other software or platform. So Mensys strategy is to update OS/2 to run on newer hardware for that customers.
From the community point of view, we like OS/2, we have been using it from a long time and it is our personal preference. Maybe I will be lying if I say that eComStation is the best of all operating system, but I'm not lying when I say it is my personal choice.
I understand that it is very hard to attract new users to this community with the costs that eComStation currently has, but it can not be free of charge. The code still belongs to IBM and Mensys has to pay royalties. I even tried to convince Mensys to make an eCS VM free of charge, without support, AS IS, and only for non-commercial use, but they told me they can't.
I hope that someday we can have an open source clone of OS/2, but that something that is going to take time and we require a lot of help (If you want to help coding, documenting, testing you are welcome). OSFree (
www.osfree.org) is trying to build this clone but require more resources and developers. From the other side, any GPL software that can be included on eComStation will also be a step further on this dream.
Regards
Martin