imugz...@gmail.com (Itschak Mugzach) writes: > The term 'open' for me is the liberty to choose. To choose the > hardware from many makers and to move easily from one operating system > to another. See how many are moving from unix to Linux so easy. The > mainframe is not dead nor the customers. They, who can choose, vote > for liberty. IBM killed all alternative hardware makers and now they > buy or resell software makers. In Israel most of the mainframe sites > are looking their way out, telling them selves this is because COBOL, > pricing, and other tails. The real truth is that IBM kills the > industry by being a monopoly. The only chance I see for the industry > is IBM allowing alternatives.
I had the discussion with the (disk division) executive that sponsored the "open" implementation for MVS. His view would be that it would make it easy for customers to move applications from non-IBM platforms to MVS. My claim was industry motivation for "open" was that it would make it trivial for customers to move applications to whatever platform they wanted to ... eliminating proprietary lockins that had previously been the norm. Frequently move to the latest most cost effective platform, aka hardware platform agnostic, promoting competition and accelerating improvements. It is also seen in things like industry standard benchmarks like TPC (price/transaction, watts/transaction, etc) http://www.tpc.org/ trivia ... former co-worker at ibm san jose research http://www.tpc.org/information/who/gray.asp For IBM, it was sort of in the genre of SAA ... billed as application could be run anywhere ... but really met that application could be moved to the mainframe ... while human interface could be on some other platform. SAA was part of communication group desperately fighting off client/server and distributed computing trying to preserve their dumb (emulated) terminal paradigm and install base. The communication group had stranglehold on datacenters with corporate strategic ownership of everything that crossed the datacenter walls and the disk division was starting to see the effects with drop in disk sales (data fleeing the datacenter to more distributed computing friendly platforms). The disk division had come up with number of solutions to correct the problem ... but the ones that involved actually crossing the datacenter walls were constantly vetoed by communication group. some past posts (including references to claim that communication group was going to be responsible for demise of disk division) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal My wife had written 3-tier architecture into response to large gov. super-secure, campus environment RFI ... and then we were using 3-tier in customer executive presentations and taking all sorts of arrows in the back from the SAA forces. past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#3tier The "open" for MVS didn't actually involve anything that crossed the datacenter walls so the communication group couldn't veto it. He was also investing in companies that produced mainframe products that crossed datacenter walls (communication group could veto his developing and selling IBM distributed products that physically crossed datacenter walls, but couldn't veto him from investing in non-IBM companies). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
