Hi Roderick
You are right, but you don't share or understand (?) my open source vision.
I don't want to diminish anybody's work hacking some software to make it work. I think that any effort to run other unsupported network cards by any way possible with GenMac is good. If you know how to hack it keep doing it, it is good for today.
But looking into the future, any eCS-OS2 software built on this days, any hack made to the kernel or to any other application
that does not share the source code, it has the higheest probabilities to turn into the abandoware of the future.
If the developer turn it open source under an OSS license, if they share the source code, it will be harder for the software to turn into abandoware. Even if the original rights of the software get bought by a company (ex: mySQL spin offs) or even if the developer die.
Sure, hacking software to make it work it is good, but it is way better to go the open source way.
GenMac is not dead, it "WILL" be dead if it don't get open sourced. Once day it will be hard to hack it, one day it will not work on newer hardware. That is my vision. Hacking is good, Open Source is better.
Again, hacking GenMac to test unsupported cards it is good, I even going to try it (once I manage how to install eCS on a i5 Machine that I had)
Changing subjects, I support OSFree because one day it will be so hard and expensive to patch eComStation (since it is not open source) that no one on earth will be able to hack it to make it work on newer hardware (without virtual machines

. A long term open source OS/2 replacement is what we need because of that. To have access to update the code directly without patching. I don't like or share the short-term idea of "we can patch eComStation until the end of time". Now you can "Patch" but you can't "Update".
I don't want to diminish anybody's work on eComStation, Mensys is doing a great job on supporting users to make eCS run in today's hardware, but what is the long-term strategy? ("we can patch eComStation until the end of time")
We need a long-term strategy that provide tranquility on using the platform and ensure that it can be further developed. So, relaying on the IBM code we will have a future? no way. We need to slowly replace every single component of OS/2 and eComStation with open source replacements to have vendor/developer independence.
Regards
Martin Iturbide
OS2World.com