According to a PC Week article of 1986[2] and a subsequent one in 2009,[3] the sole author of this program was a developer in Thomas Watson Research Center, Oleg Vishnepolsky.
A copy of his program ended up with a reporter of PC Week, who published an article speculating that IBM and Lotus' deal may be coming apart.
IBM attorneys and executives in the end decided that the program does not violate the Lotus copyright.
Given S2's wide adoption within IBM they decided not to withdraw it from use, and let Vishnepolsky to continue its development.
Vishnepolsky however lost interest in further development of S2, moved to another project and later authored TCP/IP for OS/2 and IBM POS terminals.