On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 3:00 AM, Dave Wade <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am going to say something you gentlemen may not like...
>
> 1) Do you need the product?
> 2) Do you need continued support, e.g. for legal and compliance reasons?
> 3) is the company in financial difficulties?
>
> If the answer to all these is "yes" then paying the increased charges may
> be your best option. If the company folds or files for protection  it
> matters not how many bits of paper you have, if there is no business to
> honor the contracts you have then replacing the product may be much more
> expensive. In my humble IBM is the biggest player of these sorts of games
> and is doing an excellent job of squeezing the last drop of blood from its
> traditional mainframe customers..
>
> .. and throwing lawyers at a problem usually drives the costs up even
> more...
>

​I think you have some very valid points. I don't think that _any_ software
company offers the following "option", but it is one that I'd like. What I
_wish_ every company would "require" from a vendor is that should the
vendor either "go out of business" or "sunset a product", that the customer
would get a copy of the current source for the product, along with all
internal documentation. No, I have not been taking any "funny pills". I do
realize that perhaps all of the current z/OS vendors would like like hyenas
if anyone asked this of them. Which is yet another reason that I am a FOSS
advocate. An individual company might not be able to support "some
product", but the "community" could possibly do so.



>
> Dave Wade
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>



-- 
"Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is
ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to