"what does IBM really have to lose?" I agree that licenses of some sort need to be accessible to the small developers; however if a "hobbyist" license is granted, how do they keep it from being abused by unscrupulous companies who then run their business on the "hobbyist" machine rather than the "commercial" mainframe license (that they dropped once they found they could get away from it)?
Perhaps IBM needs to be allowed to do something the other vendors are doing - bundling all sorts of software in as part of their "OS". For example - Microsoft Paint, Notepad, and Wordpad are all demonstrably applications; their "drag to the CD to burn it" software is demonstrably a backup utility. IBM unbundles all of these things now - I think because of the consent decree way back when, correct me if I'm wrong. What if they were allowed to sell us a single OS license that included everything we needed to run our apps, including CICS, WebSphere, and DB2, and they priced it for what z/OS goes for now? Would our bean counters be happy? Tim Hare Senior Systems Programmer Florida Department of Transportation (850) 414-4209 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
