Before anyone gets upset, this is ONLY my opinion, I'm not trying to force anyone to do or believe things the way I do, so please don't flame me just because you feel z/OS ought to be free (as in beer) just because you want to use it and don't think you should have to pay. I'm sure there are people who say the same thing about the Disney theme parks, that they cost too much and should be free or low cost, but that's just not going to happen and neither is z/OS going to get a rate cut any time soon.
I don't think anyone on this list would consider running production under Hercules or z/PDT, or even running production period. What would production even mean for most, if not all of us. I think 99.9% of the people who use Hercules have absolutely no interest in running a production data center on it. The people on this list who are already (or were) systems programmers have little interest in starting up a production site "at home". :) I agree that IBM would be well served to come up with a lower cost alternative for people who want to just try stuff out. But as all of us who are systems programmers know, users have a really, really bad habit of breaking things, so who would maintain that "shared" platform? Certainly it can't be group maintained by some shade-tree systems programmers out of some altruistic feelings to help the world use z/OS. I don't think I know 3 systems programmers that can completely agree on how to run a single LPAR let alone something that people want to be able to do their own I/O gens on (and actually try it out to see if it works). So IBM would have to probably create a (paid) staff. If we use something like the Dallas test center as an example, there would be about a dozen people (minimum) absolutely necessary to fully support the project (systems people, operators, help desk 24x7 shift support, etc.), so we would be looking at a cost of (easily) $1.2 to $1.6Million (probably much more). If we take $1.4M and assume 300 people want to use it. That's over $4,600 each, every year per user. If there were more people it would obviously be a bit cheaper, but remember, these aren't ordinary people using CICS to answer customer service calls, these are systems programmers and applications programmers who want to build and break stuff, create looping code, design some stuff that probably doesn't work (yet), so the more you add the more staff they will need to support it. I think $10K up front and $900 a year to keep the subscription active and current is VERY cost effective compared to a huge shared system with 300 other people. Besides, if you get 10 or even 5 people together and share the cost, I think you can make z/PDT affordable for almost everyone and it's worth every penny. Remember, it's just my opinion, you can read it, or not and agree or not, but do take any of this personally, it's only meant to be my opinion on the subject, not the holy grail or anything. Brian On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 16:29:39 -0400, Tony Harminc <t...@harminc.net> wrote: >On Fri, 3 Jul 2020 at 11:45, Grant Taylor ><0000023065957af1-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote: > >> I find it very difficult to believe that some business couldn't rent out >> tiny z/VM guests as VPSs for < $100 a month. Limited resources (storage >> / CPU / DASD) would be perfectly fine for hobbyists & students. > >It's not obvious that the licence that such a business has from IBM >would allow that. There have been questions on this list from time to >time about where someone can go to buy commercial z/OS time, and there >are a few answers. But it's still not clear what licence such >providers may have with IBM. > >> I want to be crystal clear on something. I think that z/PDT is >> perfectly acceptable for businesses, even small ones. It is only the >> smaller / lower end market that it is a problem for. > >The z/PDT (both versions) is explicitly licensed for non-production >use only. Even routine production builds for running on Real Iron are >proscribed. > >Tony H. > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, >send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
