There had to be at least little by little efforts to get out of the closed source code and have a future.
It is happening, little by little. Unfortunately, too little, and too late, to be of much use. Those who are doing the projects are overworked, and don't get a lot of help. Fortunately, they are learning more as they go along, so it is not as difficult to do new projects.
Plus PMView is not open source.
No,it's not, but it is available, and has been updated not too long ago. There is nothing wrong with closed source programs, as long as they are supported. Unfortunately, not all authors, or companies, have the courtesy to open source their work, when they decide to quit working on them. That was, in fact one of the great failures of Mensys. They did not have an ironclad contract for SVista, and it went away when it was sold. There are some other examples of that too.
Which Project? "We will patch OS/2 until..." ??
No, the whole eComStation project (OS/2 has not been updated, at all, since IBM dumped it, except in the form of eComStation).
There is something wrong here. We are not a business, we are a community.
WE are a community. Mensys is a business. If they are going to stay in business, they need customers. If Mensys goes away tomorrow, so does eComStation. The rest of us are not ready to stand alone. If everybody pulls together, it may be possible to do it, someday, but there are too many things that need to be done for it to happen over night.
But the business don't want an state of the art OS, they want something that work for their needs.
Actually, that isn't quite true. Most businesses want some sort of "support", for whatever it is that they use. eCS has limited support, mostly supplied by users. OS/2 (or eCS), is still used, because there is a hard core group of consultants, who know the system pretty well. The main "problem" that most businesses have with that is that there is a limited possibility of being able to sue them if something major goes wrong. Patching the current software still leaves the "mark of IBM" on the whole product. If somebody replaces all of those parts, business is going to be looking pretty hard, to make sure that it still works the same, and it isn't going to be easy to do the benchmark testing to prove that. An open sourced OS/2 will be taking a back seat behind the major Linux distributions, simply because they have a longer track record.
The "reality check" is: We open source or the platform die when we can no longer patch it anymore or when "business" don't found it relevant to patch it anymore.
If OS/2 is open sourced, without having the source from IBM to do it, a lot of large customers will back away, simply because their IT group will not be able to say that "most of it is from IBM". Unfortunately, that is the mentality of large business, and open source doesn't impress them much, or they would already be using Linux. I am not too sure what the answer really is, but a careful migration to something new will need to be followed. Just throwing out the current kernel (for example), and replacing it with something new (if it was anywhere near to being ready), is not going to impress those who don't really know anything about software, but do know that IBM has a good name, but they don't know who built this new kernel. They won't be spending money for that, until it is proven to be reliable, and fully supported by some outfit that is a lot bigger than Mensys. (There will always be exceptions).
Don't get me wrong. A lot of the old stuff is going to need to be rewritten (preferably as open source, but even if it is kept private by a company like Mensys, it is still a good thing), just to keep it working, but a mass change, overnight, is not going to happen. Even a slow migration is going to take some effort from every user, and the race is on to see if eCS can stay with the mainstream hardware, and software. I don't believe that there is much hope of getting ahead of the mainstream (meaning windows, of course), unless some OS/2 user wins the biggest of the big lotteries, and donates it all to the cause.