> Wish they had a community version I could play with, but understand they would be worried about cannibalising their already small market.
They may not have a choice either. IBM still owns OS/2. ArcaOS, like eComStation before it, is a licensed distribution. Their FAQ entry on refunds indicates that they have to pay IBM for their part of every license and that portion is both nonrefundable and nontransferable so if they refund a license they've lost that amount. It also presumably sets a lower bound on how little they could charge without actually losing money on every copy distributed. It would not actually surprise me to find out that their "personal edition" license is as cheap as they can consider "worth it" to offer.
IBM clearly stopped caring about growing the OS/2 market decades ago and I don't think Arca Noae really has any ambition to either. It's not like there's any realistic scenario where it suddenly becomes appealing as a target platform for anyone not already heavily invested in it outside of occasional hobbyists. The lack of any concept of users and privilege levels makes it undesirable for most desktop and server use cases that don't basically come down to "appliance" and as an appliance it's hard to see what OS/2 via ArcaOS on modern x86 offers over more popular platforms, especially with the 32 bit 4GB ceiling forever overhead. Changing those things would require substantial compatibility breaks which is not really viable when your core business is supporting environments that don't want to change their software.