I would imagine that some of that discussion has been preserved. Up until recently I had a copy of the OCO white paper that was developed by the VM group at SHARE. At that time (and perhaps still) it was the most cogent argument as to why IBM should not remove access to the source code for VM. I think people like David Boyes, Harry Williams, etc., will be better able to answer in more detail. What everyone forgets, though is that not only was the source code for VM available, but for MVS as well. (True, it was PL/S, and only on microfiche, but we _had_ it.) It was very useful for debugging problems at a time when the IBM support folks were much less skilled and helpful than they are today (Hi Mike!).
Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Florian La Roche [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2001 7:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: LCS drivers for 2.4.9 ? > And among the "mainframe" people are some who remember the great OCO war of > the late 80's, early 90's between the VM world and IBM. A compromise (of > sorts) was reached where that part of VM that had always been source code > would remain so and so would new features that were not related to company > trade secrets. > > The paradigm for VM had always been the availability of source code. A lot > of the innovation in the early days of VM was driven by the user world > because the source code was available. Are there some "history" pages about these discussions? Are parts of the current VM code available from IBM? How much of that code has changed from being available then to closed source? Seems like "good-old" VM customers understand how important source code is for a better operating system... cu, Florian La Roche
