Dear Visionary,

The desktop operating system market is no longer a market. It is a tax.

One company extracts rent from nearly every personal computer on Earth while delivering a product that grows slower, heavier, and more hostile with every forced update. Enterprises pay billions in licensing and support extortion to keep twenty-year-old applications alive. Power users and gamers grit their teeth through bloat, telemetry, and artificial obsolescence. There is no real choice, because there has been no real competition for thirty years.

There is, however, a proven, battle-tested foundation waiting to end that era—and to become one of the most profitable software franchises ever created.

In the early 1990s, IBM and Microsoft jointly developed OS/2. When the partnership fractured, IBM carried the torch alone and produced OS/2 Warp: an operating system that was faster, more stable, and more compatible with DOS and Windows software than Windows itself, running flawlessly on hardware that made Windows 95 crawl. When IBM withdrew from the consumer arena, the incentive for lean, reliable code vanished with it.

That architecture did not die.

Arca Noae and the engineers at NetLabs have kept it alive, modernized it, and proven it still outperforms everything else on modern 64-bit hardware. Projects like OS/Free [aka OS/3] and ReactOS are a testament to the realization of the value in the path not taken. Today’s ArcaOS already boots on the latest Intel and AMD platforms, runs 16-bit Windows and DOS programs with perfect fidelity, and delivers a level of crash resistance and speed that Windows users never realized.

What remains locked away is the complete original IBM source code and a handful of associated intellectual properties (some of which involve third parties beyond IBM and Microsoft.) Those rights can be acquired or licensed. The precedent already exists: Arca Noae successfully negotiated access to the pieces required to ship a commercial product today.

This is not a museum piece. This is a commercial superweapon.

Imagine Warp Genesis: a clean, fully 64-bit, proprietary desktop operating system built on that foundation and sold at a premium or licensed OEM with new computers:

• Lightning-fast boot and application launch on everything from a fifteen-year-old Duo Core to the latest high-end Xeon workstation
• Native-quality execution of DOS games, Windows 3.1/95/98/XP 32-bit applications, and selected modern titles—without the cruft of compatibility modes and planned obsolece. Many companies (including the manufacturing and resource extraction sectors especially) depend on VMware to run OS/2 or older versions of Windows and other platforms only to support software that already works, so why replace it?!
• True application crash isolation (an app dies, the system laughs and keeps running)
• A modernized, high-DPI Workplace Shell that makes File Explorer look and behave prehistoric
• Zero telemetry, zero forced updates, zero advertisements, zero account required
• Aggressive enterprise licensing at $199–$399 per seat for organizations desperate to escape Microsoft’s pricing, telemetry, and end-of-support threats and OEM licensing with fair pricing to compete with Microsoft's inferior product lines.
• Retail boxed editions and digital premium licenses that enthusiasts and small businesses will buy in droves simply because it is fast and proven solid

The addressable markets are enormous and largely captive:

• Fortune 500 companies still running mission-critical OS/2, XP and Windows 7 applications
• Banks, insurers, and governments facing seven- and eight-figure “extended security update” bills
• Industrial control and point-of-sale operators who need rock-solid uptime forever, no lost sales due to forced update downtime due to poor IT policy, that impacts small businesses especially.
• Millions of retro-gaming and productivity enthusiasts who will pay for the best DOS and early-Windows experience ever

All that stands between today and hundreds of millions (eventually billions) in annual profit is a single decisive transaction:

1. Acquire or secure broad commercial licenses to the remaining IBM OS/2 source code and associated intellectual properties (the same process Arca Noae already uses, simply on a larger scale.)
2. Respect and compensate any third-party IP holders whose components were part of the original ecosystem.
3. Enter into an exclusive, revenue-sharing partnership or merge with Arca Noae, NetLabs and the OS/3 group—the only teams on the planet who have proven they can deliver on this architecture in 2025 moving forward.
4. Fund a focused one- to three-year commercial development push to produce Warp Genesis as the premium, proprietary alternative the world has been denied for three decades.

This is not charity. This is not open source. This is a straightforward, high-margin software business built on superior technology, aimed at customers who are exhausted by the status quo and have nowhere else to spend their money for the personal computer. Options like Linux or OS/X either lack ease in a central support model or required specific hardware to run out of box.

You would own the first first-party desktop operating system launched in a generation that actually wins on technical merit and user respect, not on vendor lock-ins to a market saturated to 64-bits of a brat that does not clean up after "32- bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can 't stand 1-bit of competition."

Someone with the resources, the competitive instinct, and the willingness to negotiate a clean IP package needs only to step forward, secure the rights, fund the final push in partnership with Arca Noae and NetLabs, and if any OS/2 folk are left at IBM, and start regaining on the investment by giving people what they have been begging for since after Windows XP: an operating system that is fast, solid, compatible, and theirs.

The monopoly has gone unchallenged for far too long, making Microsoft vulnerable to exploitation for social domination rather than protecting individual freedom. Users deserve an operating system that respects them and lets them actually get to their work, without interruption; without compromises. 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.

In OS/2 Warp, the only error I got and should ever get is a simple reminder "this file is already saved" when trying to save a text file in 'E.exe' the default editor in OS/2. At least I have some reassurance that my file is not eaten up by some slip in a future AI version of "clippy" over a bug in some cloud syncing bullwinkle, or by some deep state [bad] actor that decides to follow orders to simply not agree with what you do.

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.)