On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 12:18:55PM +0200, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > The EBCDIC systems (IBM mainframes running z/os or their close > variants in other similar mainframes, BUT NOT the Linux-on-z/os which > uses ASCII) are rare, and because of their multi-million dollar price > tags, and often financially related applications, they are closely > guarded by their users. Therefore getting random open source > developers any access to the systems is really hard. (Perl 5 porters > lucked out in early 5.8 in that they had access to not just one but > two z/os systems, one within Texas Instruments, and one in an IBM > development center. Unfortunately these accesses no more exist, and > it has been proven extraordinarily hard to find any people within IBM > that would make them arrange software development access to anyone > external.)
I still run the old "public-domain"-ish MVS 3.8 and VMr6 on a Hercules emulator. Although access to a modern z/OS software system still requires effort and/or money, access to genuine hardware isn't necessarily an impediment? -- Henry Yen <[email protected]> Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York (800) AEGIS-00 x949 1-800-AEGIS-00 (800-234-4700)
