IBM announced earlier this month that it will withdraw its operating system OS/2 officially from sale on December 23 this year and will offer support through to the end 2006. Now that the funeral has been announced the active OS/2 users that still exist are calling for the operating system to be made open source.

Should OS/2 be made open source? Back in it's hey day OS/2 was a very significant operating system and was major competition to Microsoft Windows, now it is only used by a few banks for it's ATM's. Making it open source would mean that it could be updated for today's hardware and would also make it more secure as all aspects of the system would be open to peer review.

Does the world need another open source operating system? With IBM's commitment to Open Standards and Open Source ( Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat, J2EE etc ) maybe making OS/2 open source could be a wise move that will keep those few remaining OS/2 customers happy.

What do you think?