John, I well remember my own sticker shock when I first spoke with MicroFocus sales several decades ago. As a consultant at that time, I wanted to license a single copy of their COBOL and CICS environments for non-production development use on my personal workstation. IIRC they were quite firm about the $8,000 purchase price per workstation and 15% annual maintenance fee (also per workstation) regardless of how or where it would be used. No exceptions.
z390 is a wonderful and creative tool for a hobbyist to experiment with. As far as I know it is definitely NOT ready to support anything like production volume levels or real CICS and z/OS reliability levels. IMHO, not a good move for a business that wants to stay in business. You should also tell that programmer and your management that the originator and maintainer of z390 is currently looking for a new maintainer to take over from him, and I do not know if that search has been successful yet. GNU OpenCOBOL isn't a solution either as there is no CICS support there. There are other (expensive) options out there from "legacy conversion" companies who will take your IBM mainframe applications and move them to distributed systems for you. Like any other outsourced conversion, you get what you pay for. Caveat Emptor. TANSTAAFL -- I giggle with you! Occasionally karma kicks butt where it is really needed. Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 9:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [giggling] Does anybody use z390, other than as a hobbist? Why am I giggling? I had one of our programmer's ask me about z390, both COBOL and CICS. We _are_ getting off of z/OS. But a "sticking point" (PITA) is the COBOL and CICS code (somehow). We had planned on using Microfocus for our needs. I have heard that management is now in "sticker shock" mode and looking for "something else" which could be used but does not cost as much. By "not cost as much", I really mean "costs less than a Starbucks latte". OK, I'm getting tacky again. -- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
