OsFree Project (Open Source OS/2 Clone) | Hacker News Reader

OsFree Project (Open Source OS/2 Clone)

osfree.org

49 pointsmindcrime14 comments

Yes IBM couldn't open source OS/2 because there were at least 300+ third party commercial licensed pieces of code that it used to make it happen. They would have to get permission from them all to open source their code.

Besides OSFree there is also the Voyager project: http://voyager.netlabs.org/

Voyager takes on a Star Trek name because OS/2 3.0 was named Warp and IBM tried to use Star Trek to market it.

I'd like to see the OS/2 API calls in a WINE type environment for GNU/Linux to run OS/2 code under Linux and other operating systems. It would be easier than providing driver support for modern hardware.

Cool, I always liked OS2, but I wonder what the chances are for this to succeed? Even reactos is far from complete, and the window for Win2k-2003 compatibility needs is shrinking.

Indeed, one of the things I mentioned when I was discussing the OS/2 2.0 fiasco was that OS/2 was much more difficult to clone than MS-DOS.

I once proposed that ReactOS, AROS, HaikuOS, OSFree, FreeDOS, and others all share source code to make a complete operating system that could run apps from different operating systems so they don't all have to reinvent the wheel each time a new OS is written.

Imagine an OS that can run DOS, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, AmigaOS apps and have them interact with each other.

The thing about OSFree is that it is an alpha test and not a full OS yet. Some other operating systems are farther along and if they shared source code they could make OSFree more complete. Using ReactOS source code on OSFree would add in Windows driver models and the ability to run Windows apps like Win-OS2 did on OS/2 2.0. It would make finding drivers a lot easier if they had a Windows Driver.

I've donated to Haiku and ReactOS in the past, I hope they finish one day.

That was Microsoft's original plan for Windows NT: Win32, OS/2, and POSIX would be different API servers running on the NT microkernel.

The OS/2 programs were command line only and didn't include the GUI ones.

Microsoft removed the OS/2 ability in future versions of NT. Originally it was Microsoft OS/2 NT 3.0 as Microsoft wrote their own version of OS/2 shared with IBM like they did for DOS. But they added the Windows GUI to it and re-branded it as Windows NT 3.1.

I think the POSIX was removed as well in a future version.

I remember Windows NT 4.0 for MIPS systems, it had some sort of DOS emulation level as well. Microsoft wanted NT to be cross platform and then bailed on it and went Intel only.

IBM tried OS/2 for PowerPC systems and it flopped as well.

Actually, MS did have something called the "Windows NT Add-On Subsystem for Presentation Manager" that permitted one to run 16-bit OS/2 GUI applications.

> I hope they finish one day.

"Software is never finished, only abandoned."

I liked OS/2 at the time - a lot - but I am not sure why would anyone want an OS/2 clone at this point in time. Besides the "because I can" and "it's fun" standard reasons for building an OS, there is little reason to do it.

OS/2 was still used in some finance sectors. The Parallels virtual machine software was supposedly originally created to provide virtual machines to continue to support OS/2. (Porting Parallels to Mac OS X was an opportunity that came along later.)

Someone still maintains an OS/2 port of Firefox. Mozilla removed the OS/2 files from the Firefox source repo just last year because they no longer compiled. IIUC the OS/2 maintainer couldn't upstream his fixes to Mozilla because he replaced Firefox's build system (autoconf + python DSL) with kbuild "in order to simplify maintenance and speed up the build process".

https://github.com/bitwiseworks/mozilla-os2

https://bugzil.la/969757

Still waiting for 0.0.5. But i guess Dezember 2009 isn't to far off... Dead project!

Now the ATM vendors that opposed Microsoft might get some security updates and improvements. And run on a microkernel, too. Interesting lol.

Edit to note: open-source updates and improvements rather than eComStation.

Is there a Python to Rexx transputer? :)

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