The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[email protected]> writes: > With the rise of clone processors, there was change in decision to not > charge for kernel software ... and my (about to be released) resource > manager was selected for guinea pig ... i got to spend 6 months off & on > with business planning people & lawyers working on policies for kernel > software charging (this was made more complex during the couple years of > transition when there were parts of kernel that were free and parts that > weren't free and possibly complex dependency between free and not free > kernel software). Besides the change to charging for kernel software > (because of rise of clone processors), the later OCO (object code only) > decision was possibly another outcome. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#29 Justice Department probing allegations of abuse by IBM in mainframe computer market http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#31 Justice Department probing allegations of abuse by IBM in mainframe computer market one of my hobbies was doing distributions of highly enhanced operating systems for internal locations. one of the long-term customers was the HONE system ... providing world-wide online sales&marketing support (by mid-70s, mainframe orders couldn't even be submitted w/o having beeing processed by HONE applications) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone so in parallel with resource manager and bunch of other stuff ... I was also involved in SMP ... and kernels support SMP ... a couple recent posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#10 Microprocessors with Definable Microcode http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#14 Microprocessors with Definable Microcode http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#17 Broken hardware was Re: Broken Brancher large number of HONE applications were implemented in APL and as a result HONE was quite CPU intensive. One of first production places for the (standard 370) SMP support was consolidated US HONE datacenter (part of one of my internal releases). I've commented before ... that in the late 70s, The consolidated US hone datacenter was a cluster (loosely-couple) of SMPs ... possibly the large single-system image operation in the world at the time. Now, I had crammed a bunch of stuff into the resource manager product ... that wasn't strictly related to dynamic adaptive resource management (in fact nearly 90 percent of the code). Now one of the issues in starting to charge for kernel software ... was 1) initial kernel software to be charge for wouldn't even direct hardware support, 2) kernel software that was directly required to support hardware would still be free, and 3) "free kernel software" couldn't have as a prerequisite "charge for software" in order to work. So the way that SMP hardware support was implemented ... required a bunch of stuff that I had already released in the (charged for) resource manager product ... so when the decision was made to release the SMP support ... there was a problem with requiring the charged for resource manager in order for SMP support to work (which was violation of the policies for charged for software). The resolution was to move 90% of the lines of code out of the "charged for" resource manager ... into the free non-charged for kernel software ... allowing for SMP software support to ship w/o having a dependency on charged for software (the price charged for the "new" resource manager stayed the same ... even tho it was only about 10% of the lines-of-code). -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
