Goodnight, OS/2...

Cini, Richard wrote: I am afraid this won't happen. Even the recent kernels, and the application set as well, is still full of old "compatibility" 16 bit code stemming from OS/2 1.x which was written by Microsoft. I have seen kernel sources containing "Copyright (c) Microsoft 198x" in most 16 bit assembler files. Besides, compiling the kernel is not a very simple issue because it requires certain versions of MASM, MSC 16 bit, MSC 32 bit, and IIRC also some version of IBM C. Third party code also exists IIRC, the exeunpack code that the loader uses to expand the packed LX format had been a binary-only library linked to the kernel. There are proprietary tools to build the thunking library DOSCALL1 which are available in binary only as well. It is truly amazing that the result from such a code base is still such a stable system. Given the kernel is already such a mess, I do not really want to know what dead bodies are still buried in the PM, WPS, and other subsystems. Let's say it this way: you probably wouldn't touch this code even with a long pole unless it'd make your income. But even if IBM has now - again - buried OS/2 (reminds me of those zombies which you could endlessly put into a grave - they'll despite come up again and again), you could still buy the successor ecomstation which is genuine OS/2 ander a different brand. This is promising, as not everything is lost, but as it shares the same above codebase, it diminishes chances of an open source. Regards Holger