As I was writing my post in this thread, I started thinking about the good old days when OS/2 was king. Linux was new and strictly for the eggheads, and Windows was an unstable piece of crap.... uh.... well, some things never change.

I always loved OS/2, and even today I think it could still be a real player if somebody (ahem.... NOT IBM) handled it properly. I always thought Apple was reinventing the wheel with OSX - a Mac face on a Unix kernel is a great idea, but IBM did it 10 years ago. Why spend the R&D?

So here we are in 2002, and the last version came out in 1996, presumably the end of the road for OS/2. I don't think IBM even supports it anymore. At least if they do, it's nominal. I've often found myself wishing that Gnome or KDE were as intuitive or polished as OS/2's Workplace Shell. (For those who have never seen it, it's VERY Macintosh-like). And since OS/2 was always a close relative of AIX as far as the kernel went, I've often wondered about the possibility of releasing at least the WPS (if not the entire OS) under the GPL so it can be ported to Linux and/or incorporated into Gnome and KDE.

IBM has made it clear that they don't know what to do with it, so why not? It's not a new idea, and it's been discussed for years, but I wonder if the climate in 2002 is right for it. They've already released JFS to the Linux community, and IBM is the biggest backer of Linux out there right now. I found this editorial by Chris Wright on the subject. Everything he says is absolutely true, but that was 4 years ago. Has the climate changed enough that it might be possible? If it happened, would anybody care now? Would the Gnome and KDE projects accept the WPS code, or would they reject it as being a Johnny-come-lately?

What do you think?