ATMs[edit]
ATM vendors NCR Corporation and Diebold Incorporated have both adopted Microsoft Windows XP as their migration path from OS/2.[citation needed]
Diebold Incorporated initially shipped XP Embedded Edition exclusively, but following extensive pressure from customer banks to support a common OS, switched to XP Professional to match their primary competitor NCR Corporation.[citation needed]
Security niche[edit]
OS/2 has few native computer viruses;[44] while it is not invulnerable by design, its reduced market share appears to have discouraged virus writers. There are, however, OS/2-based antivirus programs, dealing with DOS viruses and Windows viruses that could pass through an OS/2 server.
Petitions for open source[edit]
Many people hoped that IBM would release OS/2 or a significant part of it as open source. Petitions were held in 2005 and 2007, but IBM refused them, citing legal and technical reasons.[45] It is unlikely that the entire OS will be open at any point in the future because it contains third-party code to which IBM does not have copyright, and much of this code is from Microsoft. IBM also once engaged in a technology transfer with Commodore, licensing Amiga technology for OS/2 2.0 and above, in exchange for the REXX scripting language.[46] This means that OS/2 may have some code that was not written by IBM, which can therefore prevent the OS from being re-announced as open-sourced in the future.[47][48] On the other hand, IBM donated Object REXX for Windows and OS/2 to the Open Object REXX project maintained by the REXX Language Association on Sourceforge.[49]
There was a petition, arranged by OS2World.com, to open parts of the OS. Open source operating systems such as Linux have already profited from OS/2 indirectly through IBM's release of the improved JFS file system, which was ported from the OS/2 code base. As IBM didn't release the source of the OS/2 JFS driver, developers ported the Linux driver back to eComStation and added the functionality to boot from a JFS partition. This new JFS driver has been integrated into eComStation v2.0, the successor of OS/2.
Technology[edit]