On 7/14/22 12:04, Peter Duffy wrote:
[snip]
> M$ and IBM haven't always been rivals - worth remembering that
> OS/2 was originally a joint venture. Then they decided to go their
> separate ways and fork the OS/2 project: IBM carried on developing
> OS/2; M$ hacked their version into Windows 95 (remember they took over
> the front page of the Times to advertise the launch of it?). (Shame
> that OS/2 vanished off the radar. I used it daily for a number of
> years: it was infinitely better than windows.)

Caveat: two hazy recollections from long ago.

1) It'd be hard to find sources for it any more but IBM was not careful
about the copyright and the code base ended up with a terrible mixture
of code, some copyrighted by M$ some by IBM. M$ also got potential
customers to postpone purchasing the obviously superior operating system
through a very effective "wait-and-see" whisper campaign. So that
basically paralyzed the OS/2.

2) On top of that, there was not much market demand for OS/2 due to the
nearly complete lack of desktop applications for it. That lack was
because while M$ had agreed to write some key applications for OS/2, it
instead used the time secretly to write for NT. By the time IBM found
out, it was too close to release to do anything. Later, IIRC, any team
of developers wishing to write for W95 and get that little approval logo
on their packaging had to also write the same application for NT. The
license for the NT SDK had piggybacked onto it the prohibition of
writing for competing operating systems. At the time I thought that was
about killing the Mac game market but looking back I can see it was also
about keeping OS/2 from getting even the smallest amount of traction.


Anyway, back to Lennart, there are still few facts to go on at this
point but given the apparent secrecy we can speculate that something big
is brewing. Can this be tied to the restricted boot deployments? Lenovo
is now selling laptops that refuse by default to boot non-Windows
operating systems.

I hope the derivative distros see the writing on the wall so that more
use Devuan for their upstream source. Tails, Ubuntu, Linux Mint,
Finnix, Kali, and others risk their future otherwise.

/Lars