On Thu, 22 Aug 2019 at 08:27, John McKown <john.archie.mck...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 7:18 AM Raphael Jacquot <sxp...@sxpert.org> wrote:
> > did the competition (amdahl & others) had a "license" to produce mainframes > > ? > > Good question. I was told that the 3rd party CPU hardware parties quit when > XA came out do to some change. But I don't know if it was licensing, or > maybe some patent, or just too expensive in the R&D area. It happened with the switch to z architecture (roughly speaking, 64-bit). Amdahl and the others had been licensing both patents and software for machines running up to ESA/370. In particular, to run a parallel sysplex requires coupling code to run in a coupling facility, and although I know Amdahl wrote their own, they had to license the specs (unpublished) from IBM to do so. By the time of zArch, IBM had for some time been patenting individual machine instructions (who knew that was legit...?), the US consent decree was ancient history, the European agreement that required them to license things had just expired, and IBM presumably figured they could get away with it. So they refused to license 64-bit anything to anyone. (Well, who knows what they may have done in private, but certainly there are no known 64-bit z machine makers with IBM licences.) > Maybe that is why IBM doesn't go after Hercules/390. IBM doesn't do much of anything unless serious money is involved. So they have indeed sat quietly wrt hobbyist use of Hercules, but IBM *did* go after Hercules when real money came into the picture. IBM didn't *start* the legal action, but they did refuse to license z/OS for use on Hercules. So the makers of the commercialized version of Hercules (TurboHercules) went after IBM, and lost. The other would-be zArch-on-Intel competitor, PSI, was bought out by IBM earlier, in 2008. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
