OS2World

OS2World is a site a that provides news, forum and wiki services to the members of the OS/2, eComStation and ArcaOS platform community members. This community has been active since the year 2000 to the current date.

History
OS2World web site was started by Kim Haveblad on the 2000. His goal was to provide free web site hosting for the OS/2 community. On that year Martin Iturbide joined to help since he was interested on posting daily OS/2 related news from several sources. He started to post the news under the /news address, after some months Kim Haveblad decided that the news should be on the main site and installed a news script to fulfill this service.

By November of 2000 Kim Haveblad improved the services of the site including a user forum and a gallery script to publish pictures. He also installed a links system, to link other OS/2 sites and started the OS2World Awards.

On 2001 OS2World started to created a series of articles called "Developers around the World" with interviews to OS/2 developers. And on the same years the OS2World staff started to write more articles for the site about different topics related to OS/2. Also on this year a poll system for the site was included. On the same years the "OS2World Gaming Site" was launched by Martin Iturbide hosted on the same OS2World server.

The site had a visual upgrade on 2002.

On 2004 Martin Iturbide make it public that wanted to turn as much of OS/2 abandonware as open source and he started a permanent campaign that has lasted to the current day, the OS2World staff supported that idea. As a result a Github account for OS2World was created to store as much as open source OS/2 software that can be found.

On April of 2007 OS2World.com V5 was released with a new website design. The Website was migrated to Joomla 1.x and after that a new forum script was installed using SMF Forum 1.1.x.

At the end of 2012 a HDD crash left OS2World without service. On the beginning of 2013 the new site was rebuilded from scratch with the latest version of the Joomla and SMF forum scripts (OS2World V6) available and this time a single sign on feature was enabled between the main site, the forum and Wiki.

OS2World Awards
During five years, since 2000, OS2World started the OS2World Award to give a recognition to OS/2 software developers, events, companies and websites. There were six different categories like Best Supporting OS/2 Company, Best OS/2 Event of the Year, Honor Award for Individuals, Best OS/2 Site of the Year, Best Commercial Software of the Year and Best Individual Software of the Year. The award prices were donated from the OS/2 ISVs from that time.

Petition to Open Source OS/2
On April of 2005, OS2World promoted a signed petition to request IBM to open source OS/2, or the components that they can. The news got published on Slashdot.org and referenced on other technolog sites. On September 25 of 2005 it was sent to IBM's CEO, Sam Palmisano containing 11,613 signatures. OS2World did not get any answer from IBM' CEO until on November 19, 2007 they sent a second letter requesting a reply. On January of 2008 IBM sent a response to the second petition replying that they will not open source OS/2.

Position Against OOXML
OS2World also took a position against Microsoft OOXML to became an ISO standard. OS2World staff followed closely the Swedish Standards Institute voting for this standard and announced on its website irregularities on this process.