I have grown weary of responding to Paul Gilmartin's moral outrage of the day, but today's does require some comment. He writes:
<begin extract> If I _own_ a thing, you shouldn't be able to do anything that prevents my doing what I want with it. RACF is badly oblivious to this. <end extract> This is a bad design notion. (It is also bad law; the state can invoke eminent domain to take my property away from me for purposes that I may disapprove.) MVS and its immediate antecedents have, properly in my view, always judged that many operations must be virtualizable. The functioning of LOAD and DELETE provide a convenient example of what this implies If I LOAD a reentrant program that is not already present in storage, it is loaded and its usage/invocation count is increased from zero to one. If instead it is already present in storage, having been loaded by someone else, its usage count is increased by one. If I then DELETE that program, its usage count is reduced by one; and only if that count is thus reduced to zero, i..e., if no one else is currently using it, is the storage occupied by this program recovered for reuse. Paul's notion that the absolutist property-rights doctrines of 19th-century robber-baron capitalism provide an appropriate system-design paradigm has a fatal flaw. It prevents sharing those resources. Like many of his other comments, this one makes sense for a literally 'personal' computer, one used by a single person. It is radically inappropriate to a mainframe, the resources of which are shared by many people. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
