OS/2 fans to IBM: give us the code

Fans of IBM's OS/2 operating system are petitioning the company to open source the discontinued operating system, or least portions of it.

A petition on the OS/2 World website, which is signed by over 8000 people, argues that an open source version of OS/2 will ensure that current users will be well served.

"Customers that are willing to continue using OS/2 will get the benefits of an open OS that will be continuously developed by individual developers and/or software companies, their ownership fees will decrease and they will have the enhanced security of an OS that will continue to be relevant due to the open-ended nature of open source (following the BSD and Linux examples)," the petition states.

An IBM spokesperson on Monday threw cold water on the idea, however.

"We looked at it. But there were a number of third-parties involved in OS/2 over the years and decades, which means there's a tangle of legal and contractual issues. So it's not very easy to do," said IBM spokesman Steve Eisenstadt. "It's not going to happen."

Aware of some of the legal complexities in potentially open sourcing OS/2, the authors of the petition have called on IBM to just release those pieces that don't have any legal strings attached. "What we ask of IBM is to release as much of the source as possible and list the OS/2 components that need an Open Source replacement."

In theory, those missing "holes" in OS/2 will be filled in by open-source developers.