> Nope, but I'm free to go buy some piece of hardware that isn't tied up > with intellectual property "issues".
That's always your decision to make. If the objective is complete purity of essence, then we can sit around and theorize or select a different solution that meets the immediate needs. We can also try to do something constructive that convinces IBM to work with us. It's about the same amount of effort, and IMHO the idea of using some understanding of the way IBM's internal mindset works to effect change is ultimately more useful. > In other words, is the mainframe > really worth all of this? From the testing I've done, I'm not > convinced... > a cluster full of inexpensive Intel boxes seems faster and > cheaper to me, > and > doesn't carry the baggage of hardware written to run an OS that is > completely foreign to Linux (OS/390). For example, with a > cluster of PCs, > each machine can have *GASP!* a console that actually works with vi. If that solution is more effective for you, then you're free to use it at the costs of any choice. Like I tell the content control fascists who want to water down anything on the Internet to the level of pre-digested pre-composted baby food, "You have the right to use an off switch and the ability to install filtering software on your PC to block anything that you don't want to see. Exercise that right." Me, I'm more interested in fixing the problem than complaining about it. > This could be a temporary solution, until some bug in the > binary bit of code > cause it a) not to build properly or b) not to function properly. > Then we are right back to bitching and IBM to fix it. Make up your mind: do you want a perfect world or working network drivers? If a perfect world, you're going to be waiting a while. If you want working network drivers, then let's get to it and quit whining about it. > > I'd like to ask the IBMers to see whether this would be > > possible. I'll work > > on getting backing, or arranging a resource of my own. > > I would applaude such an effort as a stop-gap measure, it's not the > ideal situation though. See above. Whining doesn't fix the problem. Putting up resources does. Your call -- part of the problem, or part of the solution? -- db
