🚀 go-pugleaf

assela@marcus.its.rpi.edu (A. Andre Asselin) writes:

 > I was thinking recently about the future of the PC marketplace, and
 > thought of an interesting idea.  If IBM were to make OS/2 an open
 > system (i.e.  all source freely available or licenseable at a
 > reasonable rate), I believe its market share for desktop operating
 > systems would increase dramatically.  Just think: a windowing
 > system where you don't have to guess what the documentation means
 > on a certain point (programming Windows is as much reading the book
 > as experimenting to figure out what it means).  This advantage is
 > already available in X, but this would be the first time it'd be
 > available for a mainstream desktop OS.  And if you have some
 > obscure bug that seems to be caused by a strange interaction, you
 > could not only look at the source, but also trace right down into
 > OS/2 at a source level!  My question to the net is what do you see
 > as the advantages and disadvantages of an approach like this.  How
 > would it impact OS/2 sales?  How would it impact the programming
 > community?  Is such a system feasible?  Any thoughts?

A bad idea in my opinion, since UNIX demonstrates that when source
code is released, chaos results.  100 dialects of OS/2?  No thanks!

And since when is UNIX not a "mainstream desktop OS"?!  ;-)

Best regards,
John
                                                     
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