Dear Friend of Freedom, Performance, and Computing That Simply Works,

We have watched, for more than two decades, as the once-promising trajectory of personal computing was quietly derailed. What began as a fierce competition between two advanced operating systems—Microsoft Windows and IBM’s OS/2 Warp—ended not with a superior product winning on merit, but with the deliberate withdrawal of one contender, leaving the field to a monopolist that no longer felt the pressure to improve.

The result is the operating system most of us are forced to use today: bloated, unstable, resource-hungry, riddled with telemetry, forced updates that break working configurations, and a creeping loss of user sovereignty with every new release. The sharp decline in efficiency, predictability, and raw performance that began after Windows XP was not an accident of engineering complexity. It was the predictable consequence of removing meaningful competition. When OS/2 ceased to be a commercial threat, the incentive to write tight, cooperative preemptive multitasking low resource tolerant code, to respect memory boundaries, to preserve backward compatibility without layers of emulation cruft, and to treat the user as the owner of the machine—all of that vanished.

We remember what real advancement felt like.

We remember an operating system that could:

• Run multiple 32-bit preemptive applications while still smoothly running 16-bit Windows 3.1 and DOS sessions better than Windows NT ever managed—on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM.
• Boot from cold to a usable desktop in under thirty seconds on old hardware that makes modern Windows crawl on modern hardware.
• Recover from a crashed application without taking down the entire system, because the Workplace Shell and SOM actually enforced boundaries.
• Present a clean, object-oriented desktop that knew the difference between a file and the program that acts upon it.
• Offer true protected memory, symmetric multiprocessing, and a journaling file system (JFS) years before the competition even acknowledged the concepts.

That operating system still exists, in spirit and in large part in code, maintained with new driver support with love by the community at NetLabs and the extraordinary engineers at Arca Noae. ArcaOS today proves that a modernized OS/2 kernel can run on the latest Intel and AMD 64-bit hardware (as 32-bit OS), support UEFI, large disks, modern filesystems, and still launch DOS and Windows 3.1 programs with perfect fidelity and run better than their natives.

What it lacks is not talent—it lacks capital and legal freedom.

The full original IBM OS/2 Warp source code remains in a vault. Microsoft long ago surrendered any claim it once had. IBM has no strategic reason to keep it locked away forever other than legal front costs over IP; it is a relic of a war that ended decades ago. Yet that source, combined with twenty-five years of open-source and community development, represents the shortest path humanity has to a true alternative desktop operating system that is not beholden to advertising, telemetry, forced subscriptions or deliberate obsolescence.

Imagine a new, fully 64-bit OS/2—let us call it OS/2 Warp: Genesis—built on the following unbreakable promises:

• Native 64-bit kernel and system objects from the ground up, using the existing ArcaOS and NetLabs foundation.
• Full, seamless, better-than-native support for every Windows executable from 16-bit Win3.1/Win32s through Windows XP-era 32-bit applications—without the compatibility shims, without NTVDM bloat, without the endless “this app can’t run on your version of Windows” errors.
• A DOS subsystem that runs DOS games and utilities at full speed with perfect cycle-accurate timing, better than DOSBox, better than NTVDM ever was—because it is the direct descendant of the subsystem that originally humiliated Microsoft’s own efforts.
• A clean, crash-resistant, object-oriented Workplace Shell modernized for high-DPI displays and multi-monitor setups.
• No telemetry. No forced updates. No advertisements. No account required. No “phone home” behavior of any kind.
• Rock-solid stability, low memory footprint, and blistering performance on everything from a 2006 Dual Core Thinkpad to the latest Threadripper or perhaps even Apple Silicon (via a future port).
• Open driver model so that the community can keep it alive for another thirty years or beyond.

This is not nostalgia. This is the road not taken—the operating system the industry should have had if monopoly inertia had not crushed it in the 1990s.

All that stands in the way is ownership of the original source and a serious, focused development effort of perhaps three to five years with the right team. The community has already done the hardest part: proving the architecture still works in 2025. NetLabs and Arca Noae have the expertise and the passion. They need a patron—someone with the resources to acquire the full rights from IBM, to fund a professional team, and to release the result either as open source or under a perpetual, royalty-free license that guarantees it can never again be locked away.

To the individual who has repeatedly shown a willingness to spend billions to secure humanity’s future options—whether in space, in energy, in transportation, or in free speech on the internet—we ask you to consider one more frontier whose liberation would benefit every desktop user on Earth.

Buy OS/2.
Free its source.
Fund its rebirth with Arca Noae and NetLabs.
Give the world a real choice again.

The monopoly has gone unchallenged for far too long. The users deserve an operating system that respects them. The technology to build it already exists. It only awaits someone with the ethics, the courage, and the resources to finish what IBM and Microsoft started together in the 1980s—and to do it right this time.

The OS/2 community is ready.
The code is waiting.
History can still be corrected.

With utmost respect and hope,

A user who remembers when computing was fast, stable, and ours.
(And tens of thousands who feel exactly the same.)