As of today, IBM is officially withdrawing OS/2 from the market, and
product CDs are no longer available.
The move had originally been announced in July and affects
the final two versions of IBM’s OS/2 effort, OS/2 Warp V4 and OS/2 Warp
Server for e-business.
IBM’s OS/2 effort originally began as a joint effort with Microsoft in
1985, a deal which ended in 1990 when the development partnership faltered.
OS/2 version three, released in 1992, was the first to have the “Warp”
moniker attached to it. Version four was released in 1996.
Throughout its life, OS/2 faced competition from Microsoft Windows and
never overcame it. The true death knell for OS/2 likely came, though,
once IBM began its full embrace of Linux in 1999. In fact, IBM is
explicitly recommending to OS/2 users that they switch to Linux.
“There are no replacement products from IBM,” IBM’s OS/2 migration page
states. “IBM suggests that OS/2 customers consider Linux as an alternative
operating system for OS/2 client and server environments.”
Though IBM is giving up on OS/2, OS/2 users aren’t quite done with it
yet.
Over 13,000 of them have signed a petition asking IBM to open source some, if not all, of OS/2 and its components.
“For customers that want to keep OS/2, or for those long-time users who
are considering migrating to another OS, the open sourcing of OS/2 makes
perfect sense,” the os2world.com petition states. “We also have an OS/2
community of developers that has produced several open source software (sic) for
OS/2 and many are willing to continue doing so.”
To date, though, IBM has not responded to community request to open source
OS/2.
Though OS/2 is being officially withdrawn from the market today, IBM
standard support will continue until December 31 2006 and, beyond
that, will be available as a separate Service Extension fee-based offering.