We need to remember that the CBT tape products WERE the first "Shareware" and used in production in many shops. Then the bean counters started worrying about support and got us used to support from "Vendors" rather than reading the dumps ourselves and fixing the code we had (OCO any one ?).
However after the acceptance of Linux in the shop I got much more traction on using things from the CBT tape with management as they again got used to the concept of community support software. I think that the risk just needs to be communicated and analyzed correctly. I'd love to see more current tooling ported to z/OS - but admit getting the company to pay for it would be problematical. Jerry Whitteridge Lead Systems Programmer Safeway Inc. 925 951 4184 If you feel in control you just aren't going fast enough. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lizette Koehler Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 8:47 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities? From my perspective, the mainframe and the open systems (including Mobile Apps) have different agendas and different concerns. On the mainframe we have many things working concurrently (IMS, DB2, CICS, MQ, etc). It seems in the open systems world the applications are limited to one server (or server farm). I am not aware that multiple functions can co-exist on a server. This is not to say the open systems and mobile apps that do not share these concerns - however The mainframe has massive applications that if they go down the amount of time to recover the application and/or fix it could take many hours/days that costs the business income. Or cause an LPAR wide outage that affects many more working applications (MQ, DB2, IMS, CICS). That is bad for the bottom line. Any "freeware", "Shareware", etc... brought in to a mainframe environment will eventually become a critical piece of production applications - no matter how much you say " THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION" I would suspect that once the old guard is gone - the young pups supporting the mainframe will start to do exactly what you are proposing and therefor the mainframe production environment will be more "open" From observation, it seems the open systems and mobile apps have a higher tolerance for ported tools and outages - even though it might impact production, and it does not seem to be as high as a concern. I have seen open system apps down for several days because someone used a ported tool that no one knew was there. We can see what happened when IBMLINK moved from a green screen product to a web based application. And how quickly its priority for uptime has seemed to lapse. "Email Firewall" made the following annotations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Warning: All e-mail sent to this address will be received by the corporate e-mail system, and is subject to archival and review by someone other than the recipient. This e-mail may contain proprietary information and is intended only for the use of the intended recipient(s). If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient(s), you are notified that you have received this message in error and that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately. ============================================================================== ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
