http://www.isham-research.co.uk/ibm-vs-psi-amended.html amended again.
I also understand Sam Palmisano might be asked (!) to make a deposition to the Court in the next couple of weeks. Although it looks like these cases take months longer than they should, it's actually a pretty frenetic process and a lot of people are really paying attention. I _really_ think that IBM's eighth (amended version of complaint) deserves hugely wider discussion. If a software vendor is permitted to prevent execution of software under emulation via its license agreements, all future architecture transitions - on all platforms - may become very difficult. As regards the soon-to-expire copies of Flex-ES - their users might have claims of promissory estoppel - only a lawyer could tell them, but a 'class action' style of intervention in the IBM/PSI case could be considered. Maybe the ISVs should temporarily bury the hatchet and share T3's costs. I'm sorry the following is in German, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere in English at this level: http://www.sva.de/files/RZ_SVA%20z%20Hosting_web.pdf This is the first example I've seen of a hosting service designed specifically for ISVs. Other, that is, than IBM's - and some ISVs may have concerns about hosting their development on an IBM site. SVA have a 2-CP z990 - the sketch in the PDF document is pretty self-explanatory. SVA is a _very_ well-respected company - I've known Felix for years and you won't find anyone with a bad word for him. The company is largely (entirely?) staffed by techies who understand real world problems. "For customers with Flex-ES systems additional special incentives are offered." I think SVA was the largest Flex-ES dealership in Germany by a very large margin. zPDT has been rumoured for at least four years and possibly more. Given the access to IBM intneral stuff the team should have had, this seems a long time. The 'old' PCMs had machine-readable (think Backus Naur on steroids) definitions of the architecture. Any new feature was simply encoded and the CAD system rerun to generate a new chip design. >From discussions I had, I believe Hitachi was quite some way ahead of everyone >else. What now seems to be emerging as zPDT seems to have started in Böblingen, at one time a true hotbed of Hercules use within IBM. Böblingen was always interested because it was the home of VSE, which was highly dependent on small mainframes and thus neglected by PoK. The Germans took this almost as a national insult, given the size of the VSE installed base in Germany. Then - for a while, about three years ago - came the story that [zPDT] had been outsourced to India. And not even IBM India. And then about a year and a half ago, a story of a grab by PoK. That may have happened as part of the preparations for this daft lawsuit. One [highly unsubstantiated and dubious] report suggests zPDT is not a JIT emulator but more of an interpreter. To pick up on Warner's point (4) about IBM not wanting to produce a low-end emulated-on-Intel system - they did. It was called the xSeries 430 Enabled For System/390 and it bombed. http://www.isham-research.co.uk/numaq.html A fully enabled and licensed Flex-ES system can literally run anything ever supported on an IBM mainframe. ECPS:VSE? And there's other stuff - networking, printer emulation, FakeTape, etc. Every time I ask these questions about zPDT, I just get embarrassed smirks. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
