OS2 World Community Forum

Public Discussions => General Discussion => Topic started by: guzzi on May 20, 2014, 11:38:20 pm

Title: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: guzzi on May 20, 2014, 11:38:20 pm
I just noticed this. Probably a pre-announcement, waiting for the officail publication:


http://pastebin.com/TCRGEkX0

Full text:

    Dear Fellow OS/2 Users...
     
    My name is Lewis Rosenthal. Some of you may already be familiar with me as
    the maintainer of several OS/2 and eCS mailing lists, the web host for
    VOICE, and as the treasurer of Warpstock Corporation, the advocacy
    organization which holds the annual OS/2 and eCS conference in North America.
     
    Our community has been relatively quiet over the past year or so, in terms
    of new OS/2 products and eCS releases. Late last year, I began to think
    about the future of OS/2 as a platform, knowing that in the background, a
    considerable amount of work was being done to maintain, update, and support
    eCS, with little made available to the audience.
     
    I began actively seeking investors for a new company with a new vision for
    OS/2. To my delight, I have been able to assemble a group of such
    like-minded people, and as I write this, we are forming this new company.
    Part of the philosophy of the new entity will be to maintain strong ties to
    the user community through the remaining organizations we have, and to
    cultivate long term relationships with cooperative developers and vendors to
    provide what we think is a more unified and organized face for our platform
    of choice. Call this "branding and packaging" if you will.
     
    While the products offered by the new company as packaged will be fee-based,
    as far as we are able, code will be GPL (or GPL-compatible).
     
    In the coming weeks, look for further announcements, a new website, public
    forums and mailing lists, and soon after, a working web shop.

Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 21, 2014, 04:51:58 am
I haven't found any source about it.

I really hope that this turn to be truth but for the moment is just a rumor.

Regards
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Dave Yeo on May 21, 2014, 05:18:07 am
Lewis announced it on the ecs-tech mailing list. There are other things happening that agree with it as well but it is not for me to announce what others are doing. There should be more announcements.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 21, 2014, 01:57:25 pm
Good. Thanks for sharing the source.

It was announced on May 19 on the eCS-Technical Yahoo Group (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/eCS-Technical/conversations/messages/19068).  I wish Lewis the best of luck with this endeavor and I'm willing to help on whatever it is on my hands to promote his OS2-eCS open source software projects !!!

This are very exciting news, but we also need and collaborate to this initiatives.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Lewis Rosenthal on May 21, 2014, 05:59:26 pm
Sorry for the late follow-up, here, and thanks for starting this thread!

Indeed, there are many things happening behind the scenes right now; too many to list, and lots of new and exciting stuff coming.

Right now, the best help we can get is for people to spread the word, particularly outside the normal OS/2 and eCS channels, perhaps to disgruntled/disenfranchised Windows users, who now understand the feeling of betrayal we all had when IBM decided to throw in the towel. I've had several clients of mine enter into serious discussions concerning what to do about the XP EOL situation, realizing that Windows 8.x on the PC is no joy.

Thanks again, and I'll do my best to stop by and post more often!

Cheers/2
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 21, 2014, 10:09:37 pm
Sorry for the late follow-up, here, and thanks for starting this thread!

Indeed, there are many things happening behind the scenes right now; too many to list, and lots of new and exciting stuff coming.

Right now, the best help we can get is for people to spread the word, particularly outside the normal OS/2 and eCS channels, perhaps to disgruntled/disenfranchised Windows users, who now understand the feeling of betrayal we all had when IBM decided to throw in the towel. I've had several clients of mine enter into serious discussions concerning what to do about the XP EOL situation, realizing that Windows 8.x on the PC is no joy.

Thanks again, and I'll do my best to stop by and post more often!

Cheers/2

This.
Is.
So.
Cool.

Thank you, Lewis!
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 21, 2014, 11:27:21 pm
Hi Lewis

Good luck with it. I hope that everything works fine.

Sorry to go further on this and try to discuss thing about your company that I do not know about, but I cannot resist trying to see ahead.

1) Please do not hear anybody that is saying to you "this is impossible", or "this cannot be done". I personally received private’s emails trying to stop me every time I propose something that may change the "status quo" or when I try to search for some different alternatives to reach a goal.  A "reality check" is important, but I personally think you are already good on this area. If something can not be done you will find about it at it's time, but if you don't try it you will never know.

2)
Quote
While the products offered by the new company as packaged will be fee-based, as far as we are able, code will be GPL (or GPL-compatible).

I agreed that you want to set a fee for you products but please consider this:

- If you start hiding the binaries of an open source product, do not get mad if someone grab your source code and re-compile the binaries. It is completely legal and that is why open source software shifts from a “selling license” business to a “services” business.

- Please be a good open source citizen, do not try to link open source software to a close source proprietary library just to try to control the selling of binaries for a fee. This may be hard because sometimes one may fall to think that "if I'm putting money on this, I should be free to do whatever I want", but being a bad open source citizen brings bad reputation and resistance at the end.

3) A liked a lot what you said that you plan to make a company that maintain strong ties to the user community. It is hard to try to balance the “business needs for profit” with the “we want it all available for free (as in freedom)” of the community. If you try to squeeze every single dollar from the community for everything, it is possible that the community will react in a bad way. From the other side investors may want their money return in a desperate way.  So keeping balance may be a challenging task.

4) I liked a lot the way that Bitwise has done several OS/2-eCS ports. They do it in the open (with a public repository),  collaborating and receiving feedback from the community. I understand that the community may not be a reliable source of funds, but I hope that you can try to pull some interesting synergy as Bitwise has done in some of his projects. Please consider to mimic the positive side of their model.

5) Having corporate customer is important. It is important to shift from "only selling licenses" to "selling services". Licenses are a cost, while services provide added value to a customer. It is important that you charge for services to maintain the skilled people on your team. It is hard to stop thinking like the 90's where selling licenses and protecting the intellectual property was the only thing important. Now we have a lot of source code available, people like to share, and developers don't want to reinvent the wheel, times has changed and sometime is hard to understand different business models.

This is just a suggestion and a personal opinion, and does not mean it may complete apply to you, but I just cannot hold myself of the excitement to have a new player on this community.

I wish you all kinds of success with your company, and I hope I can help too.

Regards.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dazarewicz on May 22, 2014, 06:31:24 pm
I don't typically read forums like this, but I was asked to post something here.

I know it has been really quiet in the OS/2 community for a long time. This can lead some people to think that nothing has been happening. Actually, a lot has been going on in the background. Development continues and we are working on a new infrastructure to distribute updates, handle support, etc. There are several people involved in working on this new infrastructure, including myself and Lewis. Watch for some new, exciting things coming very soon.

David Azarewicz
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: R.M. Klippstein on May 22, 2014, 06:59:08 pm
Thanks David for the post! Finally we are getting hopeful indications that the future of this O.S., that a lot of us have been supporting since back in the 90's, might still have a future in the hands of a more competent group of leaders and will continue to have people like yourself supplying the technical expertise!

klipp
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Steven Levine on May 22, 2014, 07:15:10 pm
Hi guys,

Like David, I don't typically post to these forums, but I would also like to say we are still here and development continues.  My primary focus at the moment is on OpenWatcom updates to support building Firefox.

Enjoy,

Steven
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 22, 2014, 08:17:35 pm
I don't typically read forums like this, but I was asked to post something here.

I know it has been really quiet in the OS/2 community for a long time. This can lead some people to think that nothing has been happening. Actually, a lot has been going on in the background. Development continues and we are working on a new infrastructure to distribute updates, handle support, etc. There are several people involved in working on this new infrastructure, including myself and Lewis. Watch for some new, exciting things coming very soon.

David Azarewicz

When is 2.2?
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Dave Yeo on May 23, 2014, 04:26:41 am
ecomstation I'm sure is trademarked so I'd guess we should be expecting something more like 1.0 with whatever name Lewis and friends come up.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: BigGoofyGuy on May 23, 2014, 03:43:03 pm
I find this thread to be encouraging.  8) It seems there no future for OS/2 - eCS and OSFree seems to be missing in action. I am there seems to be a future for this cool opeating system.  8)

Perhaps a thread could be started on what people might consider a new name for the newer operating system?  ;D I wonder how creative the possible names could be.  ::)
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Pete on May 24, 2014, 02:16:58 am
Hi Tom

Well, if it was a Swedish operating system we could call it "BjornAgain/2"   ;D


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: BigGoofyGuy on May 24, 2014, 02:14:02 pm
Hi Tom

Well, if it was a Swedish operating system we could call it "BjornAgain/2"   ;D


Regards

Pete

I think that is really funny.  ;D
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 24, 2014, 07:46:25 pm
OSFree seems to be missing in action

It seems you really do misunderstand the amount of work needed for such a project.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 25, 2014, 12:07:45 am
Hi Boris.

Nobody misunderstood the quantity of work that is to create an OS/2 clone. Sadly OSfree does not have the funds or developer time to keep going. I really respect the developers that made it and created the plan. The development plan is very good and straight forward, but without developers it can not evolve as all of us we will like to.

I really think that the goal for an open source OS/2 clone is to focus in one component at the time, I said WPS on the past, but other have different approach like starting from the Kernel/Loader and other starting cloning the PM.

I appreciate valerius, since he stills code on it and make different kind of tests. But I think that Tommy might be right saying that "OSFree is missing it action", it does not mean something bad for the developers or project idea, just that the project is not advancing as we all like to.   But I insist that the good thing of open source is that we can take all efforts and join them together. So every open source effort on this platform will benefit all of us.

The other thing is that #OSfree IRC channel is available and I hang out there almost daily and help is always welcome. Any developer out there is welcome to join the IRC channel and check with valerius the progress and help with it.

Everybody is welcome to check valerius's latest commits to the project on sourceforge. (http://sourceforge.net/p/osfree/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/)
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 25, 2014, 12:36:13 am
Hi Boris.

Nobody misunderstood the quantity of work that is to create an OS/2 clone. Sadly OSfree does not have the funds or developer time to keep going. I really respect the developers that made it and created the plan. The development plan is very good and straight forward, but without developers it can not evolve as all of us we will like to.

I really think that the goal for an open source OS/2 clone is to focus in one component at the time, I said WPS on the past, but other have different approach like starting from the Kernel/Loader and other starting cloning the PM.

I appreciate valerius, since he stills code on it and make different kind of tests. But I think that Tommy might be right saying that "OSFree is missing it action", it does not mean something bad for the developers or project idea, just that the project is not advancing as we all like to.   But I insist that the good thing of open source is that we can take all efforts and join them together. So every open source effort on this platform will benefit all of us.

The other thing is that #OSfree IRC channel is available and I hang out there almost daily and help is always welcome. Any developer out there is welcome to join the IRC channel and check with valerius the progress and help with it.

Everybody is welcome to check valerius's latest commits to the project on sourceforge. (http://sourceforge.net/p/osfree/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/)

Are you fine? :)



I've started writing a reply to you three times, but every time I ended up erasing my message.

I just d-d-don't understand what t-t-the... what should I--
er-r-r...
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 25, 2014, 12:41:02 am
O-o-oh sure!

Yes, that's what I'm gonna say to you.

Please check the thingy where notes from the "contact us" form on the os2world's main page fall to. There must be a letter form Pavel Shtemenko about BSD drivers porting project.

Also martin@os2world.com doesn't work.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 25, 2014, 12:56:39 am
Boris.

You just need to calm down, on this community all want the same thing, "To continue using OS/2 and eComStation".
We may have discussion on how we want that and different points of view, but there is no need to see every conversation like a fight.

You need to know the players of the community and learn how to communicate with them in a right way, otherwise you will create rejection.

The worst thing that can happen to you in a community is not getting complains, the worst thing is getting ignored.

I will check what is happening with OS2World contact form, the email seems to work fine but you can contact me at martiniturbide@gmail.com too.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 25, 2014, 01:01:41 am
Boris.

You just need to calm down, on this community all want the same thing, "To continue using OS/2 and eComStation".
We may have discussion between how we want that and different points of view, but there is no need to see every conversation like a fight.

You need to know the players of the community and learn how to communicate with them in a right way, otherwise you will create rejection.

The worst thing that can happen to you in a community is not getting complains, the worst thing is getting ignored.

I was not going to fight with anyone, it is just too... wrong to expect any "action" (I suppose, to give a fully completed OS/2 OSS replacement?) from a project aiming to rewrite 100% of an operating system and complain it hasn't done this yet. Also it is good to remember osFree currently has got 2 (two) developers, which are not spending their all spare time to it.

So I've replied that one is misunderstanding what osFree is... where can you see a fight?
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 25, 2014, 01:02:34 am
but you can contact me at martiniturbide@gmail.com too.

Okay cool, I'll make Pasha copy the e-mail to this mailbox too.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: Martin Iturbide on May 25, 2014, 01:36:15 am
So I've replied that one is misunderstanding what osFree is... where can you see a fight?

Maybe I took it on the wrong side. But I think that is better to say "Remember that OSfree only have two developers, an that valerius keeps posting commits to OSfree source code to sourceforge. Remember that this kind of project requires a lot of work. Everybody is welcome to help, join and chat at #osfree" instead of "It seems you really do misunderstand the amount of work needed for such a project." I prefer my version, but that is just my personal opinion :)

But lets move on, I apology if it made you feel uncomfortable.
- The OS2world contact page is working fine (at least with my email).
- I got Pasha email, it is interesting but I need to discuss it with the rest of the OS2World staff. Sadly we are not known for being the fastest decision taking community on earth :)

Regards
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 25, 2014, 01:47:09 am
But I think that is better to say "Remember that OSfree only have two developers, an that valerius keeps posting commits to OSfree source code to sourceforge. Remember that this kind of project requires a lot of work. Everybody is welcome to help, join and chat at #osfree" instead of "It seems you really do misunderstand the amount of work needed for such a project." I prefer my version, but that is just my personal opinion :)

Yes, yours is okay, but, taking into account that I'm not you and that all people differ slightly, I say I'm not that polite by default, and I usually answer in the same tone and manner to the person I'm replying to. So if I get "no action", I answer "you misunderstand". Maybe there are better ways to behave.



- I got Pasha email, it is interesting but I need to discuss it with the rest of the OS2World staff. Sadly we are not known for being the fastest decision taking community on earth :)

Yeah, nice. I'd be glad if you put Pasha's proposal on the public display as soon as possible, because he needs an answer really soon (AFAIR, June the 4th), because otherwise he will need to take another (non-OS/2) project to be able to buy some food to eat something, and hence no chance to work on OS/2 thingies for some time again. :(
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: BigGoofyGuy on May 26, 2014, 01:22:58 am
OSFree seems to be missing in action

It seems you really do misunderstand the amount of work needed for such a project.

I have tried getting to http://www.osfree.org but it does not come up. It still does not come up as of 05-25-2014. There is another post indicating it is being worked on.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: dbanet on May 26, 2014, 11:53:56 am
I have tried getting to http://www.osfree.org but it does not come up.
I've told you already there are problems with the site.
This is kind of stupid, but the free plan of the DNS hosting osfree.org is delegated to has got a limit just of three A records, so for now www.оsfree.org does not get resolved to the main site, but osfree.org does; check it out yourself (http://osfree.org/).

No need to panic. It's just a web site.

I've already told him to change the DNS hosting to a better one (and even recommended the one I use), but still no action. :-\

There is another post indicating it is being worked on.
Sorry, couldn't you rephrase yourself please? I don't get you.
Title: Re: Breaking OS/2 news, new OS/2 company! New OS/2?
Post by: BigGoofyGuy on May 27, 2014, 12:19:09 am
I have tried getting to http://www.osfree.org but it does not come up.
I've told you already there are problems with the site.
This is kind of stupid, but the free plan of the DNS hosting osfree.org is delegated to has got a limit just of three A records, so for now www.оsfree.org does not get resolved to the main site, but osfree.org does; check it out yourself (http://osfree.org/).

No need to panic. It's just a web site.

I've already told him to change the DNS hosting to a better one (and even recommended the one I use), but still no action. :-\

I tried the link. It comes up.  ;D Thanks.  8) I book marked the site.

Quote
There is another post indicating it is being worked on.
Sorry, couldn't you rephrase yourself please? I don't get you.

I will try but I could just end making it worse.  :-[

I think it is this thread that I was thinking of, the one indicating there are new interest in the development of eCS.

Hopefully I clarified it instead of confusing it more.