> IMO, FWIW (other acronyms omitted) I would love something like z/PDT for > a home user. The "problem" that I perceive that IBM has with such a thing > can be summed up as "somebody could use that to make money developing > software and I won't get a fair cut." IOW, IBM doesn't think that a >"personal copy" would only be for learning purposes, but would be > "perverted" to actually make money.
This discussion always makes me think of how other vendors respond to ideas like this. DEC neatly solved this problem by making the "learning" copies of VMS capable of only single user on the system console -- unless you had permission for more. To go multiuser or to login anywhere but the physical machine console, you had to have a license that authorized additional users (1 to unlimited user). Historically, DEC (and later HP continued the policy) was fairly liberal with development licenses, and the user community responded by being adults and not abusing the privilege. IIRC IBM made some somewhat half-hearted attempts in the past to do something like this but got distracted by management changes and never followed thru. VMS still has a fairly vibrant software development community, and a lot of non-trivial tools are produced by small vendors -- very few CA/BMC/etc. scale vendors monopolizing the landscape. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
