>In the end of the day it does come down to trust. Why trust a vendor of a >mainframe tool and not an open source product when the open source product may >have been scrutinised by thousands of well >credentialed experts.
>Didn't products like CICS, VTAM get a massive contribution from customers back >in the day before OCO. >Open source software runs our daily lives. From our browsers, our phones, >modems/routers, the servers running this list. Great. The OCO holy war that was lost a quarter of a century ago. Some of your points are valid. Customers did contribute significantly towards the development of IBM software before it became OCO. In the mainframe arena there isn't a great deal of open source software available (except for the venerable CBT Tape). The open source Linux tools generally require porting, which require a mainframe, which most folks don't have at home, so open source isn't significant in the mainframe arena. On a non-mainframe system, if you want to run open source software, have at it. (I use Mozilla among other things). My son in law is a big open source proponent too, but when I asked him why he preferred his Mac (another holy war) instead of Linux he couldn't answer. Bob Shannon Rocket Software ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
