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Messages - teotwawki

#1
Quote from: aussiebear on 2008.01.22, 06:25:28
My suggestion is that you folks should band together and start an opensource project to reverse engineer (clean room approach) OS/2, and write your own OS/2 variant from scratch. Place it under the General Public License (GPL) version 3, so no one will screw with you.

Now before you say anything, this process is being applied to the ReactOS Project.
http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

ReactOS is a Windows NT clone written from scratch, but under various open source licenses. (GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License, and the BSD License). Because of the way they're "reverse engineering" things, (clean room approach), MS can't do anything to them. Its no different to Wine. (A compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows apps in Linux).

The only way for OS/2 to thrive, is to open source it. To open source it, it must be free of potential legal issues. To be free of them, there is no choice but to start from scratch. While painstaking it may sound, it essentially guarantees OS/2 will live on without legal issues standing in the way.

Well, I did some digging, and you don't have to start totally from scratch. :)

osFree
http://www.osfree.org/doku/

I'm new here so apologies if this has already been suggested ...

ReactOS & Wine have both had to work hard at reverse-engineering just to find out what they need to do.
At least with IBM I'd have thought there's a reasonably good chance that they could be persuaded to release the full details of all the API specs.  That wouldn't tread on any partner's patent issues and would make the job of creating an open source version (as above) much easier.

Separating OS/2s hardware interface, application interface and user interface from it's kernel would also make it relatively easy to create an OS/2 "personality" on top of a Linux kernel, thus saving even more time & protecting IBM's investment in Linux.

You shouldn't need to source code if all the APIs are well documented and available for all to see.

It would also enable different parts to be developed independently so that the code required to make old OS/2 applications run comes first, inheriting the host Linux GUI until the OS/2 GUI gets written.