Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Edwards]

Hi gil.

> Making gcc a prerequisite might be onerous.

I think "any C compiler, including the freely available
one - gccmvs, is a prerequisite" is not onerous.

> And to my knowledge all z/OS ports of gcc are biased 
> toward legacy data sets and against UNIX files, which 
> I regard as a flaw.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying
that supporting RECFM=F/V/U is a flaw, and that
instead all C ports should be using USS?

If so, it is only GCCMVS that supports traditional
datasets. The other port is here:

http://www.cozx.com/~dpitts/gcc.html

This site has source and pre-built versions of GCC compiler for the IBM z/OS 
Unix Systems Services (USS), OpenEdition, environment. The latest compiler was 
compiled under z/OS USS 1.1.

Is that what you're considering to be non-flawed?

BFN. Paul.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Edwards]

Hi ZA.

This concept of "C is not available in many many shops"
is the exact reason I spent a large chunk of my life
porting GCC to MVS (gccmvs). I considered the lack of
a universal language for computers to be a serious
flaw in the computer industry. With the advent of
GCCMVS, C is now either bundled, or freely available,
on every commercially-used computer environment,
as far as I know. Even z/VSE has been covered.

With GCC ported, I was able to port other very useful
tools such as diff3 (three-way diffs are one of the greatest
advances in computer science in my opinion).

People can easily have a free MVS environment at home
for developing such software.

And if for some reason you need a real z/OS instead of
MVS 3.8j, that is also available at an affordable price
(z/PDT from memory).

BFN. Paul.




Bob Wrote:
>The open source Linux tools generally require porting, which require a 
>mainframe, which most folks don't have at home, so open source isn't 
>significant in the mainframe arena.

This is the main issue really, getting a descent and legitimate development 
environment is tough.

And then there is another, related subject, most open source is written in C 
which is NOT available in many many shops.  It is a legitimate, fully developed 
and wonderful compiler in z/OS but it cost money and many shops just don't 
spend that money.  So even if you go through the trouble of porting the open 
source into Classic z/OS (PDSE's, JCL, at al) as I did when I ported the PCRE 
library, it's not good enough because many potential users cannot build it 
anyway.

Providing binaries might have been a solution had we not have to deal with the 
bizarre EBCDIC issue.  The issue is not so much that EBCDIC is different then 
ASCII, that is relatively easy to handle.  The issue is that if you provide a 
binary for IBM-1047 it surely won't work on a IBM-1026 Turkish or Greek or any 
other language.  Bottom line, the port as well as it done is basically 
unavailable.

I am pretty disappointed because I really wanted to start a trend.

ZA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Mike Schwab]

I know a couple of load modules were compiled and tested on z/OS then
the binary downloaded and run on MVS 3.8 too.

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 10:53 AM, Rob Schramm  wrote:
> Anyone used it on z/OS?
> On Oct 30, 2013 5:38 PM, "Mike Schwab"  wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> > Also, isn't gcc available for z/OS?
>> >
>> http://gccmvs.sourceforge.net/
>> --
>> Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
>> Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?
>>
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <4236639181988702.wa.paulgboulderaim@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/30/2013
   at 10:16 AM, Paul Gilmartin  said:

>So the programmer codes in a regex /[abc]/, where '[' and ']' are
>radically locale-sensitive.  Must PCRE query the locale to suss out
>what '[' means,

That would be reasonable.

>or translate all input and output to a canonical
>character set? 

That would also require knowing the locale, or at least the character
set.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Rob Schramm]

Anyone used it on z/OS?
On Oct 30, 2013 5:38 PM, "Mike Schwab"  wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
>  wrote:
> 
> > Also, isn't gcc available for z/OS?
> >
> http://gccmvs.sourceforge.net/
> --
> Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
> Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?
>
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Mike Schwab]

I get those too.  Seems like the message is going two different routes
(NSA feed?).  Might be interesting to compare the list of IP addresses
in the original the rejected duplicate.

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
 wrote:
> In
> ,
> on 10/29/2013
>at 07:27 PM, Tony Harminc  said:
>
>>[Listserv decided that my message had already been posted,
>
> It had. I replied to the other copy.
>
> --
>  Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
>  ISO position; see 
> We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
> (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
>
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Mike Schwab]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
 wrote:

> Also, isn't gcc available for z/OS?
>
http://gccmvs.sourceforge.net/
-- 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Tony Harminc]

On 30 October 2013 09:29, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
 wrote:
>>On 28 October 2013 19:36, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
>> wrote:
>>> The locale-dependent services will treat a string as being in a single
>>> locale, so if you are using an English locale then "How much does the
>>> chorizo cost?" will sort according to US rules.
>
>>If you are using the US English locale, perhaps. If you used either
>>of, say, US Spanish or UK English, you would get different
>>results.
>
> Different results, yes, the results you want, no.

In IBM's implementation I think both the US Spanish and UK English
produce better results than the known-to-be-defective US English
tables.

Tony H.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 08:38:30 -0500, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
>
>>>Isn't PCRE written in C?
>
>>Yes, and that's why I had to provide binaries which is NOT ideal,
>>because the binaries are IBM1047 specific
>
>What prevents you from testing the locale? Also, isn't gcc available
>for z/OS?
> 
So the programmer codes in a regex /[abc]/, where '[' and ']' are
radically locale-sensitive.  Must PCRE query the locale to suss out
what '[' means, or translate all input and output to a canonical
character set?  This would be a massive source change, unlikely
to be accepted back into the mainstream source tree (cf. Python).

Making gcc a prerequisite might be onerous.  And to my knowledge
all z/OS ports of gcc are biased toward legacy data sets and against
UNIX files, which I regard as a flaw.

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <5600464613902175.wa.zatlas1yahoo@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/29/2013
   at 11:51 PM, "Ze'ev Atlas"  said:

>>>because they do not have C and cannot build it.

>>Isn't PCRE written in C?

>Yes, and that's why I had to provide binaries which is NOT ideal,
>because the binaries are IBM1047 specific

What prevents you from testing the locale? Also, isn't gcc available
for z/OS?
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 10/29/2013
   at 07:27 PM, Tony Harminc  said:

>[Listserv decided that my message had already been posted,

It had. I replied to the other copy.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 10/29/2013
   at 07:21 PM, Tony Harminc  said:

>On 28 October 2013 19:36, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
> wrote:
>> The locale-dependent services will treat a string as being in a single
>> locale, so if you are using an English locale then "How much does the
>> chorizo cost?" will sort according to US rules.

>If you are using the US English locale, perhaps. If you used either
>of, say, US Spanish or UK English, you would get different
>results.

Different results, yes, the results you want, no.
 
-- 
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 ISO position; see  
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <0137612305587011.wa.paulgboulderaim@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/29/2013
   at 05:25 PM, Paul Gilmartin  said:

>It could be worse than that.  How would you compare two strings,
>otherwise identical, where the embedded word is, respectively,

My mail reader can't handle UTF-8, so I'll decode by hand. If I didn't
do it wrong those are:

 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER PE
 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A
 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER EF
 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A

and

 HEBREW LETTER PE
 HEBREW LETTER SAMEKH
 HEBREW LETTER QOF

I would expect them to compare unequal regardless of the locale, with
the characters from page 4 preceeding the characters from page 5.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Ze'ev Atlas]

>>because they do not have C and cannot build it.

>Isn't PCRE written in C?

Yes, and that's why I had to provide binaries which is NOT ideal, because the 
binaries are IBM1047 specific

ZA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Tony Harminc]

On October 28 2013 19:36, Seymour J. Metz (Shmuel )
 said:

[Listserv decided that my message had already been posted, and
suggests changing a few characters. I have done so, in a way that I
trust does not change the meaning of anything that matters.]

> The locale dependent services will treat a string as being in a single locale,
> so if you are using an English locale then "How much does the chorizo
> cost?" will sort according to US rules.

If you are using the US English locale, perhaps. If you used either
of, say, US Spanish or UK English, you would get different results.

Tony H.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Tony Harminc]

On 28 October 2013 19:36, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)
 wrote:
> The locale-dependent services will treat a string as being in a single
> locale, so if you are using an English locale then "How much does the
> chorizo cost?" will sort according to US rules.

If you are using the US English locale, perhaps. If you used either
of, say, US Spanish or UK English, you would get different results.

Tony H.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 18:39:46 -0500, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
>
>Locale-sensitive compares, perhaps, but not compares that will treat a
>word in the middle of a string as having a different locale from the
>rest of the string.
>
It could be worse than that.  How would you compare two strings,
otherwise identical, where the embedded word is, respectively,
"Пасха" and "פסח"?

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <8164757574306449.wa.paulgboulderaim@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/28/2013
   at 03:15 PM, Paul Gilmartin  said:

>It's built into LE for z/OS.

Locale-sensitive compares, perhaps, but not compares that will treat a
word in the middle of a string as having a different locale from the
rest of the string.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <8360084032982097.wa.zatlas1yahoo@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/27/2013
   at 08:00 AM, "Ze'ev Atlas"  said:

>because they do not have C and cannot build it.

Isn't PCRE written in C?
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 10/28/2013
   at 02:08 PM, John McKown  said:

>I wasn't wanting to translate words. But when we do a comparison on
>the z, we basically just do a byte-for-byte compare.

While CLC et all basically compare octets, there are locale-sensitive
services in z/OS.

>chorizo

The locale-dependent services will treat a string as being in a single
locale, so if you are using an English locale then "How much does the
chorizo cost?" will sort according to US rules.

In addition, you want Unicode strings to be consistently normalized
before comparing them.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 10/28/2013
   at 11:38 AM, John Gilmore  said:

>The concept of an internal character set has the crucial
>weakness---unless full Unicode is used---that it does not address 
>the requirement that substrings from another language having 
>diffferent requirrements must be supported.

What critical characters are missing from the BMP?
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 29/10/2013 4:04 AM, Gord Tomlin wrote:

But I now see from what Mr. Gilmore has been saying that I am perhaps
wanting too much from a computer language. I will need to depend on the
programmer actually doing the proper things in all of his/her 
programs. So

that when I use chorizo in English it will show up before cider, but if
I-the-programmer know that Spanish is the "locale", that it is after
ciudad. I don't know how this can be done generically. Especially if one
throws words in Latin characters into a list with words in Greek 
characters.


"Intelligent" string collation of the sort you are suggesting is 
probably something that would find a better home in a run time library 
or in a utility product, as opposed to being built right into a 
computer language. In fact, a Google search for "locale sensitive 
string comparison" shows that such facilities are available for 
several languages.


 IBM did a very good job with ICU.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John Gilmore]

There is space among the Unicode code points for resolving the chorizo
problem and others of its sort.  One way is to use orthographic marks
or extra, judiciously chosen letters, as in another Spanish<==>English
correspondence, that of cañon<==>canyon.

For particular characters many-one and one-many equivalences that are
language-specific are also easy to implement.  Most word processors,
for example, will insert a blank/space preceding a deux-points,  ':',
or a point-virgule, ';'  in French text and omit to do so when a
colon,  ':', or a semicolon, ':' in English text.

A processing program can cope with these differences when it knows
which national-language it is dealing in locally, i.e., not too
globally.

There is a (three-roman-alphabetic-character) ISO standard
national-language code that is useful for this purpose, but even it is
problematic in some ways.

Like all long-lived coding schemes it has been abused to make
distinctions that were not envisaged in its original design.  There
are, for example, two codes for the written Chinese of China,  'chs'
for modern Chinese and 'cht' for traditional Chinese; and there are
two codes for serbo-croatian, 'shc' when the Cyrillic alphabet is used
and 'shl'  when the latin/roman alphabet; worse, there is an important
subtext here: If one is Catholic one uses the Roman alphabet, and if
one is Orthodox one uses the Cyrillic alphabet.  One thus needs to
know more than one should need to know in order to use these codes
correctly.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Tony Harminc]

On 28 October 2013 15:08, John McKown  wrote:
> I wasn't wanting to translate words. But when we do a comparison on the z,
> we basically just do a byte-for-byte compare. That does not always give the
> proper result. I am not very familar with "culturally correct" collations.

I highly recommend (as I have done here before) the old (1990) IBM
Redbook GG24-3516 Keys to Sort and Search for Culturally Expected
Results. Sadly, it is not only out of print, but I believe available
ever on paper only.

Much of the detail is dated, but it is still the best overall
introduction to the problem and its solution that I know of. And it
even has REXX examples...

> But I do remember (from 10e7 years ago) that in Spanish, the "ch" is
> considered a single character which collates after "c" and before "d". So,
> from one stand point, to do a "correct" compare would somehow need to say
> that the string: "chorizo" is greater than "ciudad".

[In passing, the Spanish, in cooperation with their colleagues in most
Latin American countries, updated their standard some years ago to
remove this behaviour. This is a bit sad, because their update came at
almost exactly the time when correct collation behaviour was appearing
in popular systems like Windows and OS/390, and was being absorbed
into the UNICODE standard. Their expressed desire to move the language
into the "modern" world of computing seems, with 20-20 hindsight,
quite misguided.]

> But in both CP-1047 and ISO8859-1, this is not true.

It is not true in any codepage, and the much stronger claim is that in
general proper collation cannot be done on a character-by-character
basis, no matter what the encoding. The "Key"s in the Redbook's title
refers somewhat cutely to the notion of building strings for
comparison that encode written language attributes other than
character-by-character collation order. Such keys can be built as
needed, or built upon data entry and stored with (or even instead of)
the raw data, depending on usage patterns and performance
requirements. All this is now quite standard behaviour on almost all
systems.

Tony H.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 16:04:26 -0400, Gord Tomlin wrote:
>
>"Intelligent" string collation of the sort you are suggesting is
>probably something that would find a better home in a run time library
>or in a utility product, as opposed to being built right into a computer
>language. In fact, a Google search for "locale sensitive string
>comparison" shows that such facilities are available for several languages.
>
It's built into LE for z/OS.  Alas, the behavior is terribly wrong for
En_US and IBM refuses to admit it.

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-28 15:08, John McKown wrote:

I wasn't wanting to translate words. But when we do a comparison on the z,
we basically just do a byte-for-byte compare. That does not always give the
proper result. I am not very familar with "culturally correct" collations.
But I do remember (from 10e7 years ago) that in Spanish, the "ch" is
considered a single character which collates after "c" and before "d". So,
from one stand point, to do a "correct" compare would somehow need to say
that the string: "chorizo" is greater than "ciudad". But in both CP-1047
and ISO8859-1, this is not true.

But I now see from what Mr. Gilmore has been saying that I am perhaps
wanting too much from a computer language. I will need to depend on the
programmer actually doing the proper things in all of his/her programs. So
that when I use chorizo in English it will show up before cider, but if
I-the-programmer know that Spanish is the "locale", that it is after
ciudad. I don't know how this can be done generically. Especially if one
throws words in Latin characters into a list with words in Greek characters.


"Intelligent" string collation of the sort you are suggesting is 
probably something that would find a better home in a run time library 
or in a utility product, as opposed to being built right into a computer 
language. In fact, a Google search for "locale sensitive string 
comparison" shows that such facilities are available for several languages.


--

Regards, Gord Tomlin
Action Software International
(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

I wasn't wanting to translate words. But when we do a comparison on the z,
we basically just do a byte-for-byte compare. That does not always give the
proper result. I am not very familar with "culturally correct" collations.
But I do remember (from 10e7 years ago) that in Spanish, the "ch" is
considered a single character which collates after "c" and before "d". So,
from one stand point, to do a "correct" compare would somehow need to say
that the string: "chorizo" is greater than "ciudad". But in both CP-1047
and ISO8859-1, this is not true.

But I now see from what Mr. Gilmore has been saying that I am perhaps
wanting too much from a computer language. I will need to depend on the
programmer actually doing the proper things in all of his/her programs. So
that when I use chorizo in English it will show up before cider, but if
I-the-programmer know that Spanish is the "locale", that it is after
ciudad. I don't know how this can be done generically. Especially if one
throws words in Latin characters into a list with words in Greek characters.



On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Gord Tomlin <
gt.ibm.li...@actionsoftware.com> wrote:

> On 2013-10-28 14:35, John Gilmore wrote:
>
>> I am not sure I understand what "handle translations of string data
>> from one language to another" means.  Something like google translate#?
>>
>>
> I was just guessing as to John M's intent, but I wouldn't be surprised if
> he meant something along the lines of Google Translate. I don't want to put
> words in his mouth, so I will let him elaborate.
>
>  Translations of this sort can be useful, but they are not yet reliable
>> enough to be usable in a notionally deterministic program, and they
>> often do very badly in the presence of semantic ambiguity.
>>
>
> Agreed.
>
>
> --
>
> --
>
> Regards, Gord Tomlin
> Action Software International
> (a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
> Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507
>
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-28 14:35, John Gilmore wrote:

I am not sure I understand what "handle translations of string data
from one language to another" means.  Something like google translate#?



I was just guessing as to John M's intent, but I wouldn't be surprised 
if he meant something along the lines of Google Translate. I don't want 
to put words in his mouth, so I will let him elaborate.



Translations of this sort can be useful, but they are not yet reliable
enough to be usable in a notionally deterministic program, and they
often do very badly in the presence of semantic ambiguity.


Agreed.


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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John Gilmore]

I am not sure I understand what "handle translations of string data
from one language to another" means.  Something like google translate#?

Translations of this sort can be useful, but they are not yet reliable
enough to be usable in a notionally deterministic program, and they
often do very badly in the presence of semantic ambiguity.

Consider

The pen, whether in or out of a pen, cannot hold a pen.

Semantically clarified this is

The , whether in or out of a, cannot
hold a .

This example does in fact contain semantic clues that help with its
translation, but neither google translate# nor it competitors do well
by it.  Fortunately, they do so badly by it that little harm is done.
The subtler errors that they make are much more dangerous.


John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-28 13:39, John Gilmore wrote:

I do not think that natural-language text belongs in a program.  It
should always be externalized in standardized text tables that are the
same in form but not in content for different natural languages.  This
sounds like a PITA, but it does not turn out to be.


The approach that John [Gilmore] describes above is very commonly used 
in open source applications. In addition to providing an easy means for 
adapting the user interface to different languages, it provides an easy 
means for users of the applications to customize the terminology of the 
application if they so desire.


Having said that, I don't think John [McCown] was advocating the 
placement of natural-language text in applications. I think he was 
hoping for reusable utility functionality that would handle translations 
of string data from one language to another. Specifically, he mentioned 
reading strings from two files and comparing them.


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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John Gilmore]

John [McKown]:

I do not think that natural-language text belongs in a program.  It
should always be externalized in standardized text tables that are the
same in form but not in content for different natural languages.  This
sounds like a PITA, but it does not turn out to be.

Some of our Canadian colleagues, whose websites are perforce
bilingual, do this very effectively.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

I guess I used "locale" when I really meant whatever something like
ISO8859-1 is (character code? - I think IBM calls it the CCSID). It might
be neat to be able to read a "string" from one file, which uses ISO8859-1
and compare it with a "string" read from another file, which uses IBM-1047,
and be able to do a compare operation which have the "proper" result. Which
indeed may be a locale since the French and the Swiss use versions of
French which sort the same glyph in different orders.

I guess what I would like is to defer the "culturally correct" results to
the underpinnings of the computer language than to require each and every
programmer to write the correct code in each and every program that they
write. So that a person could write a "x" program in France, and an English
speaker would get useful results.

OK, OK, we'll all do our programming in the only universal language:
Klingonaase. 



On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Tony Harminc  wrote:

> On 28 October 2013 11:56, John McKown 
> wrote:
> > Well, I still like the _concept_ of an "internal character set" instead
> of
> > using ISO8859-1, or CP-037, or  .
>
> No argument. The problem is that the Java developers used their
> understanding of the then nascent UNICODE standard, and hard-coded it
> in both the language and the JVM. To be fair, this was in the early
> 1990s, and they were early adopters of UNICODE at a time when there
> was still considerable resistance.
>
> > Personally, if it were me, I'd be
> > looking at UTF-8 for internal coding. And somehow address the
> > lexicographical sorting / comparison (if that's the proper phrase - I'll
> > defer to others if I'm wrong)
>
> It's often called "culturally correct", but there's nothing wrong with
> lexicographical in this context.
>
> > using some sort of locale information. Each "I/O definition"
> >  would define the locale of the external representation.
> > This would determine how to transform it to/from the internal UTF-8
> > representation.
>
> Be careful not to muddle "locale" with character encoding. They are
> largely independent. The UNIXy concept of locale carries baggage like
> sort order(s), date and time of day representation, currency format,
> etc.
>
> > It might even be nice if the language had a "string" data
> > type which has the encoded locale of the data for that instance of the
> > string value. Said locale [cw]ould be inherited when the string was read
> > from an external source, or assigned from another string.
>
> It's far from clear that locale should follow strings around.
> Certainly character encoding needs to, but in a UNICODE-only world,
> there should be just the one. But the other aspects of the locale
> notion generally follow the end-user around, not the data or the
> instance of the desktop/mobile browser or OS. There are plenty of use
> cases for end users in different countries -- or simply with different
> cultural or personal preferences -- to view the same data with
> different results on sort and search. But requirements clash. For
> example, MS Project offers choices as to (among many others) which day
> the week begins on. My week starts on Monday, but (I imagine for
> reasons only of tradition) the Project default is to start on Sunday.
> This attribute attaches to the document, where I think it should be
> part of the user preferences. So I find myself confused viewing a
> document created by someone else that has the weekend split between
> Saturday and Sunday, but if I had my own preferred view it would be
> confusing discussing the schedule over the phone with someone with
> another view.
>
> I digress, again.
>
> Tony H.
>
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John Gilmore]

The concept of an internal character set has the crucial
weakness---unless full Unicode is used---that it does not address the
requirement that substrings from another language having diffferent
requirrements must be supported.

I received an email in French this morning that contained the English text

[The White Knight]
. . . was thinking of a plan
To dye one’s whiskers green
And then to wear so large a fan
That they could not be seen.

My colleague had just encountered Lewis Carroll in
English---Improbably, there are superb, insulating French
translations---and he wanted to share his discovery with me.

This is a tractable case; but  there are also requirements to embed,
say, Arabic or Hebrew text, written from right to left, in Danish
text, written from left to right.  There is probably no escape from
the ugly device of

 || || ||.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Tony Harminc]

On 28 October 2013 11:56, John McKown  wrote:
> Well, I still like the _concept_ of an "internal character set" instead of
> using ISO8859-1, or CP-037, or  .

No argument. The problem is that the Java developers used their
understanding of the then nascent UNICODE standard, and hard-coded it
in both the language and the JVM. To be fair, this was in the early
1990s, and they were early adopters of UNICODE at a time when there
was still considerable resistance.

> Personally, if it were me, I'd be
> looking at UTF-8 for internal coding. And somehow address the
> lexicographical sorting / comparison (if that's the proper phrase - I'll
> defer to others if I'm wrong)

It's often called "culturally correct", but there's nothing wrong with
lexicographical in this context.

> using some sort of locale information. Each "I/O definition"
>  would define the locale of the external representation.
> This would determine how to transform it to/from the internal UTF-8
> representation.

Be careful not to muddle "locale" with character encoding. They are
largely independent. The UNIXy concept of locale carries baggage like
sort order(s), date and time of day representation, currency format,
etc.

> It might even be nice if the language had a "string" data
> type which has the encoded locale of the data for that instance of the
> string value. Said locale [cw]ould be inherited when the string was read
> from an external source, or assigned from another string.

It's far from clear that locale should follow strings around.
Certainly character encoding needs to, but in a UNICODE-only world,
there should be just the one. But the other aspects of the locale
notion generally follow the end-user around, not the data or the
instance of the desktop/mobile browser or OS. There are plenty of use
cases for end users in different countries -- or simply with different
cultural or personal preferences -- to view the same data with
different results on sort and search. But requirements clash. For
example, MS Project offers choices as to (among many others) which day
the week begins on. My week starts on Monday, but (I imagine for
reasons only of tradition) the Project default is to start on Sunday.
This attribute attaches to the document, where I think it should be
part of the user preferences. So I find myself confused viewing a
document created by someone else that has the weekend split between
Saturday and Sunday, but if I had my own preferred view it would be
confusing discussing the schedule over the phone with someone with
another view.

I digress, again.

Tony H.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

Well, I still like the _concept_ of an "internal character set" instead of
using ISO8859-1, or CP-037, or  . Personally, if it were me, I'd be
looking at UTF-8 for internal coding. And somehow address the
lexicographical sorting / comparison (if that's the proper phrase - I'll
defer to others if I'm wrong) using some sort of locale information. Each
"I/O definition" would define the locale of the external representation.
This would determine how to transform it to/from the internal UTF-8
representation. It might even be nice if the language had a "string" data
type which has the encoded locale of the data for that instance of the
string value. Said locale [cw]ould be inherited when the string was read
from an external source, or assigned from another string. I don't know what
to do if, when writing, the locale of the data in the string did not equal
the locale of the data stream, perhaps an exception should be thrown.

OTOH, we could simply do the political thing and continue to punt the
problem down the time stream, using ad-hoc solutions in the present.



On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 08:26:31 -0500, John McKown wrote:
>
> >Although many will likely disagree, I rather like that Java decided on
> >using Unicode internally for all character data. The I/O subsystem
> >translates that to the "native" encoding on input and output.
> >
> No, Java decided to use a 16-bit subset of Unicode internally, with
> attendant, sometimes unpleasant, consequences.
>
> -- gil
>
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Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 08:26:31 -0500, John McKown wrote:

>Although many will likely disagree, I rather like that Java decided on
>using Unicode internally for all character data. The I/O subsystem
>translates that to the "native" encoding on input and output.
> 
No, Java decided to use a 16-bit subset of Unicode internally, with
attendant, sometimes unpleasant, consequences.

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

Although many will likely disagree, I rather like that Java decided on
using Unicode internally for all character data. The I/O subsystem
translates that to the "native" encoding on input and output.


On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Timothy Sipples  wrote:

> Please note that EBCDIC support is not a technical requirement for
> applications and tools running on z/OS unless those applications/tools need
> to operate directly with/on EBCDIC data. (But then that's not unique to
> z/OS-hosted applications/tools.)
>
> I think the better way to describe the situation is that z/OS customers
> often have a preference, perhaps even a strong one, for applications/tools
> that support EBCDIC when running on z/OS given that many have EBCDIC data
> they'd like to operate with/on. But it's certainly not a universal
> requirement, and there's absolutely no requirement to support EBCDIC in
> order to get an application/tool running on z/OS. Likewise, there's no
> *requirement* to support SMP/E installation, generate SMF records, plug
> into z/OS Resource Recovery Services, be ARM-aware, support any particular
> z/OS data storage method (such as VSAM), support 31-bit or 24-bit, leverage
> Coupling Facility structures, provide ISPF panels, etc., etc. Some/all of
> these features might be nice to have, but they are *not* required to get
> the application/tool ported and running correctly.
>
> It's very important not to overstate the scope.
>
>
> 
> Timothy Sipples
> GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore)
> E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Timothy Sipples]

Please note that EBCDIC support is not a technical requirement for
applications and tools running on z/OS unless those applications/tools need
to operate directly with/on EBCDIC data. (But then that's not unique to
z/OS-hosted applications/tools.)

I think the better way to describe the situation is that z/OS customers
often have a preference, perhaps even a strong one, for applications/tools
that support EBCDIC when running on z/OS given that many have EBCDIC data
they'd like to operate with/on. But it's certainly not a universal
requirement, and there's absolutely no requirement to support EBCDIC in
order to get an application/tool running on z/OS. Likewise, there's no
*requirement* to support SMP/E installation, generate SMF records, plug
into z/OS Resource Recovery Services, be ARM-aware, support any particular
z/OS data storage method (such as VSAM), support 31-bit or 24-bit, leverage
Coupling Facility structures, provide ISPF panels, etc., etc. Some/all of
these features might be nice to have, but they are *not* required to get
the application/tool ported and running correctly.

It's very important not to overstate the scope.


Timothy Sipples
GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore)
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

Locale can be set by environment variable. It's not a compile time option. The 
stock regex engines handle locales on z/OS. 

On 27 Oct 2013, at 9:00 pm, Ze'ev Atlas  wrote:

>> Why can't it test for locale?
> 
> because they do not have C and cannot build it.
> 
> for me, to change the open source library that was not designed to deal with 
> that stuff (i.e. EBCDIC locales), it would be a major surgery rather then a 
> relatively simple port.  PCRE has to be compiled separately for ASCII/UTF-8 
> vs. UTF-16, vs UTF-32 vs. EBCDIC
> 
> ZA
> 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 27/10/2013 7:16 PM, Don Higgins wrote:

I started to learn J2SE java when I left Micro Focus in 2004.  It is a very 
powerful language once you get to know the working set of library classes such 
as BigInteger and BigDecimal which I used to code emulation for all 9 HFP, BFP, 
and DFP floating point formats.  There is an unfinished version of zcobol 
included along with a lot of working sample COBOL programs.  The zcobol 
compiler which generates MLC source assembler with data labels includes support 
for all 9 floating point types.


I would rather code Scala. It's a great language which can utilise the 
entire Java runtime but is less verbose, more powerful and supports the 
functional programming paradigm in a natural way. Multi-threaded 
programming in Scala is simple and fast compared to Java.
I still code C++ and while I appreciate Java is an evolutionary step 
forward it's not that great when compared to what's out there now.



One of the big challenges with open source software is the need for ongoing 
development and support.  When I was director of IT for Florida Power for many 
years, I was perfectly willing to pay IBM, Oracle, and other software vendors 
for software that may not have been perfect but they did offer continued 
development improvements and support.


Good point. What tends to happen with open source is that once it gets 
popular it eventually becomes mainstream and enterprises start to use 
it. Once that happens it's a business and you can take your pick of 
vendors who are willing
to support it. And sometimes the source becomes less open, nginx is case 
in point.


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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Ze'ev Atlas]

>Why can't it test for locale?

because they do not have C and cannot build it.

for me, to change the open source library that was not designed to deal with 
that stuff (i.e. EBCDIC locales), it would be a major surgery rather then a 
relatively simple port.  PCRE has to be compiled separately for ASCII/UTF-8 vs. 
UTF-16, vs UTF-32 vs. EBCDIC

ZA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Don Higgins]

All

The www.z390.org website has a portable mainframe assembler and emulator 
available for download in open source J2SE java and executable z390.jar 
formats.  It runs on Windows, Linux, and Apple OSX.

This month I wrote 3 very short structured macro assembler programs to extract 
data from two reports, sort the data, and then merge the data into a single 
file for loading into a relational database.  This website has SDK zip with the 
3 MLC programs and also has PDF showing the 8 reported generated from database 
in place of the original reports.  This is offered just as a current example of 
useful open source mainframe code:

 http://www.don-higgins.net/RZDC/Rotary_Zone_District_Country_Downloads.html 

I started to learn J2SE java when I left Micro Focus in 2004.  It is a very 
powerful language once you get to know the working set of library classes such 
as BigInteger and BigDecimal which I used to code emulation for all 9 HFP, BFP, 
and DFP floating point formats.  There is an unfinished version of zcobol 
included along with a lot of working sample COBOL programs.  The zcobol 
compiler which generates MLC source assembler with data labels includes support 
for all 9 floating point types. 

One of the big challenges with open source software is the need for ongoing 
development and support.  When I was director of IT for Florida Power for many 
years, I was perfectly willing to pay IBM, Oracle, and other software vendors 
for software that may not have been perfect but they did offer continued 
development improvements and support.

Don Higgins
d...@higgins.net

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 27/10/2013 6:50 PM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:

In <1461078175079083.wa.zatlas1yahoo@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/26/2013
at 09:28 PM, "Ze'ev Atlas"  said:


The issue is that if you provide a binary for IBM-1047 it surely
won't work on a IBM-1026 Turkish or Greek or any other language.

Why can't it test for locale?
  


That's a very good point! Trouble is most software ported from ASCII 
(Expat XML parser for example) tend to only support a limit set of code 
pages.
It's a lot of work to fix it up to support the complete plethora of 
EBCDIC and usually not worth it.


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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <1461078175079083.wa.zatlas1yahoo@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/26/2013
   at 09:28 PM, "Ze'ev Atlas"  said:

>The issue is that if you provide a binary for IBM-1047 it surely
>won't work on a IBM-1026 Turkish or Greek or any other language.

Why can't it test for locale?
 
-- 
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 ISO position; see  
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Ze'ev Atlas]

Bob Wrote:
>The open source Linux tools generally require porting, which require a 
>mainframe, which most folks don't have at home, so open source isn't 
>significant in the mainframe arena.

This is the main issue really, getting a descent and legitimate development 
environment is tough.

And then there is another, related subject, most open source is written in C 
which is NOT available in many many shops.  It is a legitimate, fully developed 
and wonderful compiler in z/OS but it cost money and many shops just don't 
spend that money.  So even if you go through the trouble of porting the open 
source into Classic z/OS (PDSE's, JCL, at al) as I did when I ported the PCRE 
library, it's not good enough because many potential users cannot build it 
anyway.

Providing binaries might have been a solution had we not have to deal with the 
bizarre EBCDIC issue.  The issue is not so much that EBCDIC is different then 
ASCII, that is relatively easy to handle.  The issue is that if you provide a 
binary for IBM-1047 it surely won't work on a IBM-1026 Turkish or Greek or any 
other language.  Bottom line, the port as well as it done is basically 
unavailable.

I am pretty disappointed because I really wanted to start a trend.

ZA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <1444041293790651.wa.sachapmanaep@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/04/2013
   at 07:40 AM, Scott Chapman  said:

>If you're developing in ISPF on a 24x80 screen

It never ceases to amaze me that there are companies using 24x80
decades after it was obsolete.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <8755627167295105.wa.ibmmaintpg.com...@listserv.ua.edu>, on
10/03/2013
   at 07:31 PM, Shane Ginnane  said:

>Every employment contract I've seen includes ownership of code
>developed - and isn't limited to the employment duration.

I've redlined such contracts, and management went along with my
changes.
 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Ed Gould]

Let's not forget IBM did so as well.
CE's (and others) used to carry reel tapes along with them. These  
tapes carries some nice surprises. They were (I think written by  
IBMers ) and got wide distribution to customers.
There were of course the FDP's IBM even had a manual with those  
listed. I think they were essentially free or $25 (or there about).  
If memory serves me the programs were listed in a GC manual (ifffy  
here it might have been a GY or something close and close to 1/2 inch  
thick).


Ed

On Oct 4, 2013, at 4:41 PM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:


In
<7cd15d2a8f66c24ea70e04bc53ce3917323e2...@phcmpr1h.safeway01.ad.safewa 
y.com>,

on 10/03/2013
   at 04:23 PM, Jerry Whitteridge 
said:


We need to remember that the CBT tape products WERE the first
"Shareware" and used in production in many shops.


Every generation believes that it invented sex. People were collecting
and distributing free code well before the CBT tape, although we owe
Arnie a debt of gratitude for maintaining it for so long.

--
 Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
 ISO position; see 
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In <524dc928.2080...@actionsoftware.com>, on 10/03/2013
   at 03:44 PM, Gord Tomlin  said:

>It is almost a certainty that the employer will retain the rights 
>to the code, and almost as likely that the employer will deny a 
>request to share the code publicly.

No; what is a certainty is that there is no "one size fits all"; each
shop has its own policy. IBM has allegedly spent billions on open
source software development.

The bottom line is to ask your own management what their policy is.
 
-- 
 Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
 ISO position; see  
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
<7cd15d2a8f66c24ea70e04bc53ce3917323e2...@phcmpr1h.safeway01.ad.safeway.com>,
on 10/03/2013
   at 04:23 PM, Jerry Whitteridge 
said:

>We need to remember that the CBT tape products WERE the first
>"Shareware" and used in production in many shops.

Every generation believes that it invented sex. People were collecting
and distributing free code well before the CBT tape, although we owe
Arnie a debt of gratitude for maintaining it for so long.
 
-- 
 Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
 ISO position; see  
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.)]

In
,
on 10/03/2013
   at 07:23 AM, John McKown  said:

>The only "problem" with the CBTTAPE is that it is really only for
>_free_ ($0.00 cost), "open source" type software.

Some of the contributions on the CBT tape were binary only.

>I am not sure, but it appears that David is looking at something
>where some of us "in the field" could write something very useful.

Part of what he was talking about was ports of open source software,
much of which is covered by GPL. Of course, even for those he could
charge for support.
 
-- 
 Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
 ISO position; see  
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Mike Schwab]

Did they Python 3 released with UTF8?
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2007-October/041524.html

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Paul Gilmartin  wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:57:06 -0600, Mark Post wrote:
>
> On 10/3/2013 at 04:22 PM, Gord Tomlin wrote:
>>
>>> Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports
>>> to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept
>>> s390 patches into their code base, and are quite hostile to the
>>> platform. This situation is regrettable, since there is a wealth of
>>> tools built with Python.
>>
>>When you say they're unwilling to accept s390 patches, do you really mean 
>>they're unwilling to accept patches for z/OS or UNIX System Services?  
>>Because Python has been running on Linux on S/390 and System z for a very 
>>long time now.
>>
> 
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2007-October/041552.html
>
> -- gil
>
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-- 
Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA
Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all?

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-04 13:35, Tony Harminc wrote:

Gord,
>
>When you say they're unwilling to accept s390 patches, do you really mean 
they're unwilling to accept patches for z/OS or UNIX System Services?  Because 
Python has been running on Linux on S/390 and System z for a very long time now.

It's mostly explicit hostility to EBCDIC (the author actually compared
the notion of hard-coding ASCII to hard-coding the notion of 8-bit
bytes), but there's also extreme skepticism toward the importance of
mainframes in the real world.

Tony H.


Mark, Tony is right, it's mostly all about EBCDIC, which means the 
hostility is directed toward the operating systems that use EBCDIC as 
opposed to the hardware platform. Sorry for being inexact.


--

Regards, Gord Tomlin
Action Software International
(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Tony Harminc]

On 4 October 2013 12:57, Mark Post  wrote:
 On 10/3/2013 at 04:22 PM, Gord Tomlin  
 wrote:
>
>> Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports
>> to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept
>> s390 patches into their code base, and are quite hostile to the
>> platform. This situation is regrettable, since there is a wealth of
>> tools built with Python.
>
> Gord,
>
> When you say they're unwilling to accept s390 patches, do you really mean 
> they're unwilling to accept patches for z/OS or UNIX System Services?  
> Because Python has been running on Linux on S/390 and System z for a very 
> long time now.

It's mostly explicit hostility to EBCDIC (the author actually compared
the notion of hard-coding ASCII to hard-coding the notion of 8-bit
bytes), but there's also extreme skepticism toward the importance of
mainframes in the real world.

Tony H.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:57:06 -0600, Mark Post wrote:

 On 10/3/2013 at 04:22 PM, Gord Tomlin wrote:
>
>> Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports 
>> to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept 
>> s390 patches into their code base, and are quite hostile to the 
>> platform. This situation is regrettable, since there is a wealth of 
>> tools built with Python.
>
>When you say they're unwilling to accept s390 patches, do you really mean 
>they're unwilling to accept patches for z/OS or UNIX System Services?  Because 
>Python has been running on Linux on S/390 and System z for a very long time 
>now.
> 
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-bugs-list/2007-October/041552.html

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Mark Post]

>>> On 10/3/2013 at 04:22 PM, Gord Tomlin  
>>> wrote:

> Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports 
> to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept 
> s390 patches into their code base, and are quite hostile to the 
> platform. This situation is regrettable, since there is a wealth of 
> tools built with Python.

Gord,

When you say they're unwilling to accept s390 patches, do you really mean 
they're unwilling to accept patches for z/OS or UNIX System Services?  Because 
Python has been running on Linux on S/390 and System z for a very long time now.


Mark Post

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Scott Chapman]

I don't care for programming in Java myself, although I do from time to time. 
And I agree that Java is difficult to be productive in if you're not doing it 
every day just because there's about 6 ways to do everything. 

I would argue though that productivity is only partially about the language: 
the equal to larger issue is whether your development tools support your 
programmers' productivity. If you're developing in ISPF on a 24x80 screen 
instead of a rich IDE, you're likely going to have a hard time being as 
productive as somebody who's using a more modern tool. 

Also, languages that have a version that will run in the JVM will almost 
certainly run on z/OS. Groovy for example. JavaScript most definitely runs on 
z/OS inside the JVM. 

Scott

>z/OS is starved of decent tools. Almost every programming language has
>it's roots in the 60s, 70s or 80s. It's time for a change. And I
>don't mean Java, which isn't really a step up in terms of productivity.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Scott Chapman]

I agree completely with what John said. 

The other thing I might add is that it's possible that there are utilities that 
companies have developed in house that therefore are owned by the corporations 
that don't want to release the code for free due to concerns about liability 
and a lack of good business reason to do so. However if there was a business 
justification for it (by virtue of some sort of payment coming in) coupled with 
some sort of well-vetted legal framework protecting the providers from 
liability, may encourage some release of that code. Although whether that would 
actually happen or not is hard to say, and frankly I'm not overly hopeful.

But it would be nice if there was a way to allow for cheap/easy entry into 
developing/testing software for z/OS that doesn't involve paying IBM thousands 
of dollars. 

Re. the issue that there's not a market for software developed by small (micro) 
companies in the enterprise space, that may be true for the large shops, but 
I'm guessing that the smaller shops might be more motivated to deal with 
inexpensive software provided by micro companies. And once such micro companies 
start generating income, they can grow into something over time that the larger 
companies will be comfortable with. And there are a few small providers out 
there providing niche products to z/OS successfully.

Scott Chapman



On Thu, 3 Oct 2013 07:23:33 -0500, John McKown  
wrote:

>The only "problem" with the CBTTAPE is that it is really only for _free_
>($0.00 cost), "open source" type software. I am not really aware of any of
>the contributions which are "binary executables and support files" only. I
>don't know of a way to have something like the Apple, Google, or Amazon
>"app" store where you actually pay real money and receive an executable.
>
>I am not sure, but it appears that David is looking at something where some
>of us "in the field" could write something very useful. And then publish it
>via the "z/OS app store" in order to make some money. It would be an
>interesting way to encourage the individual practitioner to transition into
>being a small ISV. Of course, one problem with this is "where the
>individual is doing the development?" question. If they are doing it on
>their employer's machine, then the employer likely has some rights to the
>software. Most of the Apple/Android apps are developed on a person's own
>PC, and so there is not really any question about who "owns" it. Since IBM
>does _not_ supply a free/low cost way to have your own z machine with
>software, this is not likely to catch on. As much as I like it. Might be
>interesting if IBM had a z/OS system that they maintained on which an
>individual could afford to have their own account, like in the old days of
>"time sharing". Of course, IBM (on the z at least) has little or no
>interest in any "product" which does not have a high "markup". So I doubt
>this is going to happen.
>
>
>On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 6:59 AM, גדי בן אבי  wrote:
>
>> We use a few products that are freeware like XMITIP or the free version of
>> Service Pilot NBA (formerly TDSLINK).
>> There a few others.
>>
>> The CBTTAPE site is a great source for these types of products.
>>
>> I'm not sure we need something else.
>>
>> Gadi
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
>> Behalf Of David Griffiths
>> Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 2:39 PM
>> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
>> Subject: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost
>> utilities?
>>
>> Hi, I'd like to find out how much interest there would be in a wider range
>> and more up to date ports of common open source software utilities and also
>> more low cost utilities. Kind of like a z/OS "app store" where customers
>> could go to easily purchase or download for free such small programs.
>> (Leaving to one side for now the question of how we get there!)
>>
>> Would a mainframe client consider using software (applications, tools,
>> utilities, etc) in an app store like model, where the product roadmaps,
>> support, or updates are less well established, too risky?
>> Does your company have policies today that would preclude you from using
>> software in this model?
>>
>> (Disclaimer: I work for IBM but am canvassing opinion in a completely
>> unofficial capacity.)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> PS: apologies if you've seen this message before - I thought the google
>> group was a gateway to this list!
>&g

Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 4/10/2013 4:53 PM, David Griffiths wrote:

On 4 October 2013 04:15, David Crayford  wrote:

I am not one iota interested in compiling in ASCII. I've tried that before
and it's full of holes. I always end up having to manually covert code pages
to do simple stuff like write log output to sysout from a batch job.

I'm new to this list so wasn't aware that you'd done all that work
with Lua. Interesting - keep meaning to find the time to have a play
with it. By the way when we ported Java to OS390 we took the decision
to compile in ascii but that's partly because so much internal JVM
code is messing with ascii strings (e.g. from the bytecode).
System.out is then a special case because it has to convert to ebcdic.

The whole ascii/ebcdic thing is such a pain though when it comes to
porting open source stuff :(


I stumbled across Lua when I was porting another FOSS product, Redis, 
the NoSQL database which uses it as an embedded scripting engine. When I 
took a closer look I realised
I had struck gold. It was so fast my colleagues thought I was tricking 
them and running a compiled language. It's taken me about a year to port 
a substantial runtime and now
I wouldn't even consider C/C++ or Java unless there was a very 
compelling reason to do so. I can do just about everything Java can do 
with a fraction of the code and performance
is closer than you would think. Lua spends most of it's time in fast C 
code. In some cases only 10% overhead for the Lua interpreter.


If you're interested in my port drop me a line. It's more of a fork 
really, there was no point trying to convince maintainers to accept MVS 
patches.



Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 4/10/2013 5:30 PM, David Griffiths wrote:

On 4 October 2013 06:03, Brian Westerman  wrote:

Unfortunately, as many of you have pointed out in this thread, IBM/CA/BMC software is 
seen as the "premium" choice for Systems Automation software, even though 
feature-for-feature, and cost-wise we have them well and truly beaten.


Great post Brian. It sounds like image counts for a lot in this world.
I thought that if it was easier and cheaper for single developers or
small companies to both develop and market their software that you
could potentially end up with a flourishing ecosystem of low cost or
free software, but maybe I'm just being naive. I wonder what would
need to change to make customers more comfortable with that model?
E.g. in terms of support from IBM.


IBM published a redbook yonks ago wrt porting open source software to 
z/OS Unix and released lots of useful tools as a result 
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/bpxa1ty1.html.
Those tools are now stale and in serious need of a refresh. z/OS 2.1 has 
added C runtime functions for extended streams so porting the current 
version of autotools will be a lot easier. Once that's done porting up 
to date
open source software becomes a reality. IBM should run another redbook 
with new, better open source tools and offer some form of support.



Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Griffiths]

On 4 October 2013 06:03, Brian Westerman  wrote:
> Unfortunately, as many of you have pointed out in this thread, IBM/CA/BMC 
> software is seen as the "premium" choice for Systems Automation software, 
> even though feature-for-feature, and cost-wise we have them well and truly 
> beaten.


Great post Brian. It sounds like image counts for a lot in this world.
I thought that if it was easier and cheaper for single developers or
small companies to both develop and market their software that you
could potentially end up with a flourishing ecosystem of low cost or
free software, but maybe I'm just being naive. I wonder what would
need to change to make customers more comfortable with that model?
E.g. in terms of support from IBM.

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Griffiths]

On 4 October 2013 04:15, David Crayford  wrote:
> I am not one iota interested in compiling in ASCII. I've tried that before
> and it's full of holes. I always end up having to manually covert code pages
> to do simple stuff like write log output to sysout from a batch job.

I'm new to this list so wasn't aware that you'd done all that work
with Lua. Interesting - keep meaning to find the time to have a play
with it. By the way when we ported Java to OS390 we took the decision
to compile in ascii but that's partly because so much internal JVM
code is messing with ascii strings (e.g. from the bytecode).
System.out is then a special case because it has to convert to ebcdic.

The whole ascii/ebcdic thing is such a pain though when it comes to
porting open source stuff :(

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 4/10/2013 1:03 PM, Brian Westerman wrote:

Unfortunately, as many of you have pointed out in this thread, IBM/CA/BMC software is seen as the 
"premium" choice for Systems Automation software, even though feature-for-feature, and 
cost-wise we have them well and truly beaten.  In some ways, the bad economy has helped us grow to 
have so many sites, but we still have not raised our prices since we first introduced any of the 
products.  We have never once lost a client to ANY other vendor and more than 99% of our clients 
have purchased our software AFTER they ran one of the "premium" products.

So, I have to agree that it is difficult to get a site to even try a "cheaper" 
or even a free product, because of the potential for disaster, but in most cases, the 
results are well worth taking the chance.


I worked for a big supermarket company who replaced Omegamon with TMon 
because TMon was 50% cheaper and didn't hog 20% of the CPU. Price does 
matter as does performance. Some CIOs are ruthless when it comes to 
negotiating with vendors. I once worked for a company who replaced every 
single CA product because they suddenly increased their prices by 25%. 
Some of those tools were best of breed but he didn't care. He just 
wanted rid of CA and that was that.


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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Brian Westerman]

I have a slightly different view of this and have lived in both camps, (a 
vendor and a client site), so I can offer a slightly odd perspective.  A few 
years back, 12 of us systems programmers got together and decided that we would 
write the "ultimate" software tools, and they were (and are) VERY good, but 
almost no one was buying them.  We didn't have any marketing experience, after 
all we were just a dozen systems programmers, not marketing people, and it 
showed.

One day, I had a conversation with Bruce Black (R.I.P.) from Innovation and he 
told me how impressed he was with three of our (at the time 4) products, and he 
had some suggestions for making them even better.  He also has one piece of 
marketing wisdom to offer.  He said that what was holding us back is the fact 
that no matter how good our software, we were reluctant to "compete" with the 
established players, and it came off looking like we were selling the software 
from the back of a turnip truck.  He suggested we go out and take an aggressive 
look at the competition (IBM, CA, BMC, etc.) and compare our products to 
theirs, and anywhere they had an advantage, we needed to find a way to have our 
software do it better.  We did that, and it still didn't help sales because (as 
he told me a little later), we still looked like we were selling off the back 
of that same turnip truck.  

He told me to create a chart of our product compared to all of the competitors 
in a head-to-head feature comparison, and I did it, and we were far better than 
any of them (IBM/CA/ et. al.), but the only row that he said mattered in the 
end was the one I had last (which he suggested I move to first), it showed the 
cost of the products and ours was less than 5% of ANY of the other 5 columns.  

We then bought one ad in one industry magazine and ran it for 1 issue, and we 
went from 22 sites to over 500 sites in under 60 days.  

I will always be thankful of Bruce's help, and I remember before he died, he 
sent me a note to tell me that I need to remember always that it didn't really 
matter how much BETTER our software was than any of the other products, because 
we only had to be competitive with features, but the thing that really set us 
apart was that we could do it better, keep the cost low and keep the customers 
happy.  At the end of his email he wanted to tell me that the low cost thing 
was a two edged deal, you will get customers and they will be happy to save 
money, but they will never treat you like they do "the big guys" because they 
will always be reminded that they chose us on price, not quality, even though 
our quality was much higher.

So, that was my lesson from Bruce on the image that a software company has to 
deal with.  You can roll the dice and price your product competitively with the 
existing high priced ones, and sell a few copies, or you can price it fairly, 
and try to help more sites save money, and you have to decide whether you can 
live with the lesser image (and less money).  After all, We have to sell 20+ 
copies of our software for each one of IBM's, just to get the same revenue.  

Bruce had pointed out to me that the biggest difference we can provide for our 
clients is not something tangible that we can market, but our clients will know 
of it from dealing with us because we do it (create and support the software) 
because we want to help, and IBM/CA/BMC can't ever compete with us on that 
level.

Unfortunately, as many of you have pointed out in this thread, IBM/CA/BMC 
software is seen as the "premium" choice for Systems Automation software, even 
though feature-for-feature, and cost-wise we have them well and truly beaten.  
In some ways, the bad economy has helped us grow to have so many sites, but we 
still have not raised our prices since we first introduced any of the products. 
 We have never once lost a client to ANY other vendor and more than 99% of our 
clients have purchased our software AFTER they ran one of the "premium" 
products.

So, I have to agree that it is difficult to get a site to even try a "cheaper" 
or even a free product, because of the potential for disaster, but in most 
cases, the results are well worth taking the chance.

Brian Westerman
Syzygy Inc. (www.SyzygyInc.com)

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Anthony Thompson]

OT in a mainframe forum, but why the desperate need to reduce software costs 
for z/enterprise platforms? Surely management could make more savings by using 
open source software on end-user platforms rather than Windoze rubbish (e.g. 
OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, which, as usual, needs to change 
look/feel every release, and force everyone from technical support on down to 
users to re-train and re-certify). 

Don't bother to reply. I know the answer. Gutless mangers/auditors that feel 
safe with a support contract (more money wasted).

Oops.

Ant.

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of John McKown
Sent: Friday, 4 October 2013 12:00 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost 
utilities?

BTW,

I have successfully compiled and tested the basic lua 5.2.2 which I
downloaded from http://lua.org/download.html . It was basically just
download, unwind the tar using pax and converting from ISO8859-1 to
IBM-1047, then doing a "make posix". But I don't know what else I should
really look at trying to port. Or exactly how to do it. On Linux, I use git
as an SCM. But I don't having anything like that for z/OS on the system
that I'm using (not my employer's).

I don't know lua and don't have any test suite, unfortunately. And I've
just not been "with it" so far this week as far as just messing around with
it myself. I don't know how much use having the basic lua would be. I could
probably package it up for the CBTTape and give it to Mr. Golob to put on
the CBTTape web site.




On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 8:27 PM, David Crayford  wrote:

> On 4/10/2013 8:31 AM, Shane Ginnane wrote:
>
>> Good thread.
>>
>> I like Kirks ideas, but I can't see it flying. IIRC even Dave has alluded
>> to employer resistance to releasing his efforts on the Lua port.
>>
>
> The issue wrt me releasing Lua is because of our contract with IBM. I work
> for a vendor who develops software that's badged and marketed by IBM. The
> deal we signed for our
> machine had a clause that states that we can only use it to develop
> software for IBM products. There are options, such as a zPDT laptop or
> Dallas. I've had discussions with the management
> team about it and they're a good bunch of guys. I'm sure something will
> happen sooner rather than later.
>
> I don't port software for the fun of it. I do it because it's going to be
> useful. The other day my colleague was trying to write a web application
> for a test case in Java, deploying to Websphere. It
> took him almost a week, trying to understand the frameworks. It wasn't
> easy to the neophyte with the EAR and WAR and all that stuff. I could have
> knocked that up in a couple of hours in Lua in
> 200 lines of code. That's a real life use case. It's not going into one of
> our products but it saves time and money.
>
>
>  Every employment contract I've seen includes ownership of code developed
>> - and isn't limited to the employment duration. There have even been
>> suggestions that this may include ideas conceived as a result of (paid)
>> work, even if not coded/developed there/then.
>>
>> Shane ...
>>
>> --**--**
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 4/10/2013 10:30 AM, John McKown wrote:

BTW,

I have successfully compiled and tested the basic lua 5.2.2 which I
downloaded from http://lua.org/download.html . It was basically just
download, unwind the tar using pax and converting from ISO8859-1 to
IBM-1047, then doing a "make posix". But I don't know what else I should
really look at trying to port. Or exactly how to do it. On Linux, I use git
as an SCM. But I don't having anything like that for z/OS on the system
that I'm using (not my employer's).


Most Lua libraries are compatible with Lua 5.1.5. I've stuck with that. 
I ported luarocks which is a package installer similar to apt-get.
I find these days I mostly use github which is the center of the 
universe for open source. I just scripted curl commands to download

tarballs and the pax them.

There is secret sauce to the build wrt co-routines and exception 
handling. If you optimize your code it will abend. I've given the secret 
away
in another thread. Lua is a very small language (200k) and comes with a 
minimal runtime. That' is by design so it can run on micro-controllers etc.
Very different to Python which is big and heavy. Lua blows Python away 
for speed and has equivalent libraries (list comprehension etc).


I am not one iota interested in compiling in ASCII. I've tried that 
before and it's full of holes. I always end up having to manually covert 
code pages to do

simple stuff like write log output to sysout from a batch job.

You need to sort out the Lua string library patterns for EBCDIC. XML 
uses expat so you need to EBCDIC patch that. Lots of EBCDIC patching.
Porting and building a useful runtime library is where the work is. 
That's where I've spent all my time. For example, to run the web-server 
stuff in kepler you need to
convert to/from ASCII/EBCDIC at the socket level. Same for the SSL 
socket stuff. z/OS Unix has some peculiar differences to other Unix 
systems. As the majority of
packages are built for Linux you will need to fix a lot of the C code to 
compile it. Then you need to write z/OS specific libraries for TSO/ISPF 
so it can be a
drop in replacement for REXX. A Locale library to convert code pages. 
Patch the I/O library to support VSAM.


You need to be a pretty sharp C programmer to do all that.



I don't know lua and don't have any test suite, unfortunately. And I've
just not been "with it" so far this week as far as just messing around with
it myself. I don't know how much use having the basic lua would be. I could
probably package it up for the CBTTape and give it to Mr. Golob to put on
the CBTTape web site.


CBTTape is fine but I would prefer to put my stuff on github. It's got 
great tooling.






On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 8:27 PM, David Crayford  wrote:


On 4/10/2013 8:31 AM, Shane Ginnane wrote:


Good thread.

I like Kirks ideas, but I can't see it flying. IIRC even Dave has alluded
to employer resistance to releasing his efforts on the Lua port.


The issue wrt me releasing Lua is because of our contract with IBM. I work
for a vendor who develops software that's badged and marketed by IBM. The
deal we signed for our
machine had a clause that states that we can only use it to develop
software for IBM products. There are options, such as a zPDT laptop or
Dallas. I've had discussions with the management
team about it and they're a good bunch of guys. I'm sure something will
happen sooner rather than later.

I don't port software for the fun of it. I do it because it's going to be
useful. The other day my colleague was trying to write a web application
for a test case in Java, deploying to Websphere. It
took him almost a week, trying to understand the frameworks. It wasn't
easy to the neophyte with the EAR and WAR and all that stuff. I could have
knocked that up in a couple of hours in Lua in
200 lines of code. That's a real life use case. It's not going into one of
our products but it saves time and money.


  Every employment contract I've seen includes ownership of code developed

- and isn't limited to the employment duration. There have even been
suggestions that this may include ideas conceived as a result of (paid)
work, even if not coded/developed there/then.

Shane ...

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

BTW,

I have successfully compiled and tested the basic lua 5.2.2 which I
downloaded from http://lua.org/download.html . It was basically just
download, unwind the tar using pax and converting from ISO8859-1 to
IBM-1047, then doing a "make posix". But I don't know what else I should
really look at trying to port. Or exactly how to do it. On Linux, I use git
as an SCM. But I don't having anything like that for z/OS on the system
that I'm using (not my employer's).

I don't know lua and don't have any test suite, unfortunately. And I've
just not been "with it" so far this week as far as just messing around with
it myself. I don't know how much use having the basic lua would be. I could
probably package it up for the CBTTape and give it to Mr. Golob to put on
the CBTTape web site.




On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 8:27 PM, David Crayford  wrote:

> On 4/10/2013 8:31 AM, Shane Ginnane wrote:
>
>> Good thread.
>>
>> I like Kirks ideas, but I can't see it flying. IIRC even Dave has alluded
>> to employer resistance to releasing his efforts on the Lua port.
>>
>
> The issue wrt me releasing Lua is because of our contract with IBM. I work
> for a vendor who develops software that's badged and marketed by IBM. The
> deal we signed for our
> machine had a clause that states that we can only use it to develop
> software for IBM products. There are options, such as a zPDT laptop or
> Dallas. I've had discussions with the management
> team about it and they're a good bunch of guys. I'm sure something will
> happen sooner rather than later.
>
> I don't port software for the fun of it. I do it because it's going to be
> useful. The other day my colleague was trying to write a web application
> for a test case in Java, deploying to Websphere. It
> took him almost a week, trying to understand the frameworks. It wasn't
> easy to the neophyte with the EAR and WAR and all that stuff. I could have
> knocked that up in a couple of hours in Lua in
> 200 lines of code. That's a real life use case. It's not going into one of
> our products but it saves time and money.
>
>
>  Every employment contract I've seen includes ownership of code developed
>> - and isn't limited to the employment duration. There have even been
>> suggestions that this may include ideas conceived as a result of (paid)
>> work, even if not coded/developed there/then.
>>
>> Shane ...
>>
>> --**--**
>> --
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>> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
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>
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 4/10/2013 8:31 AM, Shane Ginnane wrote:

Good thread.

I like Kirks ideas, but I can't see it flying. IIRC even Dave has alluded to 
employer resistance to releasing his efforts on the Lua port.


The issue wrt me releasing Lua is because of our contract with IBM. I 
work for a vendor who develops software that's badged and marketed by 
IBM. The deal we signed for our
machine had a clause that states that we can only use it to develop 
software for IBM products. There are options, such as a zPDT laptop or 
Dallas. I've had discussions with the management
team about it and they're a good bunch of guys. I'm sure something will 
happen sooner rather than later.


I don't port software for the fun of it. I do it because it's going to 
be useful. The other day my colleague was trying to write a web 
application for a test case in Java, deploying to Websphere. It
took him almost a week, trying to understand the frameworks. It wasn't 
easy to the neophyte with the EAR and WAR and all that stuff. I could 
have knocked that up in a couple of hours in Lua in
200 lines of code. That's a real life use case. It's not going into one 
of our products but it saves time and money.



Every employment contract I've seen includes ownership of code developed - and 
isn't limited to the employment duration. There have even been suggestions that 
this may include ideas conceived as a result of (paid) work, even if not 
coded/developed there/then.

Shane ...

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Shane Ginnane]

Good thread.

I like Kirks ideas, but I can't see it flying. IIRC even Dave has alluded to 
employer resistance to releasing his efforts on the Lua port.
Every employment contract I've seen includes ownership of code developed - and 
isn't limited to the employment duration. There have even been suggestions that 
this may include ideas conceived as a result of (paid) work, even if not 
coded/developed there/then.

Shane ...

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-03 17:37, Paul Gilmartin wrote:

Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports
>to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept
>

I think you use the plural by your judgment.



Good point! And I will revise "custodians" (plural) to "gatekeeper" 
(singular).


--

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Action Software International
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Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Thu, 3 Oct 2013 16:22:23 -0400, Gord Tomlin wrote:
>
>Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports
>to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept
>
I think you use the plural by your judgment.

>s390 patches into their code base, and are quite hostile to the
>platform. This situation is regrettable, since there is a wealth of
>tools built with Python.
> 
As an alternative, might the mainstream Python be built in Enhanced ASCII
mode?  Some stumbling blocks:

o No ASCII Curses library ( an optional feature of Python).  But that might
  likewise be built from FOSS.

o No ASCII X11 library.  Don't know whether Python expects this.  Again,
  available as FOSS.

o Access to legacy data sets.  How does autoconversion interact with
  legacy data sets?  But who needs them?

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-03 11:15, David Griffiths wrote:

Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is
much of a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For
instance a company buying a $99 copy of Python for their log
processing needs?


Python is an interesting, and frustrating, case. There have been ports 
to s390, but the custodians of the Python trunk are unwilling to accept 
s390 patches into their code base, and are quite hostile to the 
platform. This situation is regrettable, since there is a wealth of 
tools built with Python.


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(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Kirk Wolf]

Skip,

RE: SFTP - I would encourage you to try Co:Z SFTP.
(Not unrelated to this thread:)
The same product is available both under a free license and also under a
commercial license with warranties, support SLAs, etc.

FWIW, this has been a very successful business model for us, with many
large customers world-wide.

See:
http://dovetail.com/products/sftp.html
http://dovetail.com/support.html

Kirk Wolf
Dovetailed Technologies
http://dovetail.com


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Skip Robinson wrote:

> 
> In another case, our shop has standardized on SFTP for secure transfers. A
> few years ago we found an open-source version that worked and appeared to
> have current support. But the Apps folks would not hear of it. They
> insisted that we buy an ISV version. Don't know the details (and would not
> reveal anyway), but we found the commercial version pretty sucky. We had
> to debug it and induce the vendor to make changes. They obviously had--at
> that time--little serious mainframe experience or the means to test their
> product thoroughly.
>
> I'm not sure what moral these cases embody, but they illustrate the
> difficulty of  taking a real business in an off-the-grid direction.
>
>

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Thu, 3 Oct 2013 14:57:08 -0400, Gerhard Postpischil wrote:
>
>(1) I still have the manual for BOUMAC, a package for vector and matrix
>calculation, from the Boulder, CO office of the National Bureau of
>Standards (the N.I.S.T. precursor).
>
... which had been called DEVMAC, internally, incorporating an abbreviation
of the author's name.

-- gil

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gord Tomlin]

On 2013-10-03 08:23, John McKown wrote:

Of course, one problem with this is "where the
individual is doing the development?" question. If they are doing it on
their employer's machine, then the employer likely has some rights to the
software. Most of the Apple/Android apps are developed on a person's own
PC, and so there is not really any question about who "owns" it.


It is almost a certainty that the employer will retain the rights to the 
code, and almost as likely that the employer will deny a request to 
share the code publicly.




Since IBM
does_not_  supply a free/low cost way to have your own z machine with
software, this is not likely to catch on. As much as I like it. Might be
interesting if IBM had a z/OS system that they maintained on which an
individual could afford to have their own account, like in the old days of
"time sharing". Of course, IBM (on the z at least) has little or no
interest in any "product" which does not have a high "markup". So I doubt
this is going to happen.


IBM does not provide a z/OS platform that is cost-appropriate for an 
individual independent developer who is not a Powerball winner. However, 
they do offer a remote development facility at Dallas. This facility 
provides you with a guest z/OS running under z/VM for USD $550 per 
month. It would be up to the individual developer to determine whether 
that price is feasible in the context of the revenues he/she derives 
from the product(s) he/she produces.


One big difficulty for this business model is the small number of 
potential customers. The Apple and Google app marketplaces each have 
hundreds of millions of potential customers. Someone producing a z/OS 
app has perhaps a few thousand at most. Nobody is about to get rich 
selling z/OS apps for $100 a pop.


--

Regards, Gord Tomlin
Action Software International
(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Gerhard Postpischil]

On 10/3/2013 12:23 PM, Jerry Whitteridge wrote:

We need to remember that the CBT tape products WERE the first
"Shareware" and used in production in many shops. Then the bean
counters started worrying about support and got us used to support
from "Vendors" rather than reading the dumps ourselves and fixing the
code we had (OCO any one ?).


Arnie Casinghino's CBT was not the first shareware. The U.S. government 
made free software(1) available for the 7xx/79xx mainframes long before 
the S/360 was designed; additionally programs for the 1401 and 1410 were 
floating around. Even limiting the discussion to the 360s, IBM had a 
distribution system for type III (IBM employee contributed software) and 
type IV (non-IBM contributions).


(1) I still have the manual for BOUMAC, a package for vector and matrix 
calculation, from the Boulder, CO office of the National Bureau of 
Standards (the N.I.S.T. precursor).


Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, Vermont

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Ed Gould]

John,

We had a standard that nothing went into production that couldn't be  
completely supported by the programmer.
Having said that we did have IBM  utilities in production and of  
course some vendor utilities in production.
How we handled it if it was a IBM utility I (or someone in the  
systems group) would help debugging it. BUT in 30 years I never had  
an issue with any IBM utility (we had one or two nasty syncsort bugs  
but that is slightly different, IMO).
The vendor utilities were only allowed if it were say DB type utility  
and the DB people would help the the people out.

We would not allow CBT tape programs anywhere near production.
We once had a "professional" give out this one utility and it was  
used in testing. It broke and I was called and saw what it was I  
called the VP and it was never heard or seen after that.
Any program that made it into production was "OWNED" by the person  
whose name was on it. He/she had to be able to debug it on their own.


Ed

On Oct 3, 2013, at 10:34 AM, John McKown wrote:


In my experience, eventually almost anything useful becomes production
critical. Some programmer will eventually get their hands on it and
integrate it directly into a mission critical process.


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 10:15 AM, David Griffiths
wrote:

On 3 October 2013 15:59, Lizette Koehler   
wrote:

I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not

incorporate them into a production - if this dies the system dies -
process.  If the tool I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not  
impact

anything but my statistics or analysis functions.


Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is
much of a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For
instance a company buying a $99 copy of Python for their log
processing needs?

Cheers,

Dave

- 
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Lizette Koehler]

I think you have to see how many mainframe CICS environments have adopted
the WEBifying processes in CICS, let along PHP for CICS.  I am a strong
proponent for putting web services in Mainframe applications.  However, I
would like to see more vetting of the ported tools to ensure a
non-disruptive environment.  Can a DoS attach occur?  Can the mainframe stop
it?  How to I restrict services when needed?  

It is also true that we have z/OS USS processes in the z/OS environment.  We
can run many ported tools.  But again, look at how many shops have adopted
it.  Vendors like CA have incorporated JBOS into their MSM product for
mainframe maintenance for CA software products.  They originally used TOMCAT
but now I think it is JBOS.  We also have HTTP functions and well as others.
We only install what has been vetted.  Other products, we take a wait and
see attitude.

They are still in the minority.

And unlike an open systems environment, we cannot buy a mainframe computer
or carve out a new LPAR to just RUN a CICS environment that supports web and
mobile applications.  That is fiscally prohibitive.  Though I am sure some
shops that are HUGE, might have the dollars to do that.  However small and
medium shop have to be much more conservative.

And I think that is the biggest difference between open systems and
mainframe.  We can multi-task huge applications and data on one LPAR or
SYSPLEX.  Whereas I believe in open systems, they just keep adding servers
or VM Ware to handle the workload.


Now, it is not for the lack of trying by some of us grey-beards.  But the
consideration for SLAs, outage impacts, up time, resource utilization, and
performance aspects, must give us pause.  I am now and always will be more
concerned about system impacts than I will with how much a ported tool could
make my life easier.

Whenever I develop in-house an ISPF application for restricted usage, I get
a ton of emails when it "does not work".  So I have seen the pain of a
limited usage process and not production.  

The last aspect I have not discussed is Change Control.  The mainframe
cannot always just add tools in, without a change control approval.  That is
why if it is under my TSO ID, I am good.  If it is shared, there is change
control.  We really do need to know what is in use and where.  Even my
production batch JCL has to go through Change Control and a Change
Management Software (like Changeman or Endevor).  If I want to bring in
something for a Proof of Concept, I have to go through Hoops.



Again, my two cents worth


Lizette


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of David Crayford
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 8:59 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost
utilities?

On 3/10/2013 11:47 PM, Lizette Koehler wrote:
>   The mainframe has massive applications that if they go down the 
> amount of time to recover the application and/or fix it could take 
> many hours/days that costs the business income.  Or cause an LPAR wide 
> outage that affects many more working applications (MQ, DB2, IMS, 
> CICS).  That is bad for the bottom line.
>
>Any "freeware", "Shareware", etc... brought in to a mainframe 
> environment will eventually become a critical piece of production 
> applications - no matter how much you say " THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION"
But CICS is now touting PHP for CICS applications for mobile devices. 
That's open source software.
To keep up with the Jones the mainframe has to adapt. If a vendor like
Rocket offer support for the open source software that's all well and good.
But that's still vendor lock in isn't it?

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Bob Shannon]

>In the end of the day it does come down to trust. Why trust a vendor of a 
>mainframe tool and not an open source product when the open source product may 
>have been scrutinised by thousands of well >credentialed experts.

>Didn't products like CICS, VTAM get a massive contribution from customers back 
>in the day before OCO.

>Open source software runs our daily lives. From our browsers, our phones, 
>modems/routers, the servers running this list.

Great. The OCO holy war that was lost a quarter of a  century ago.  Some of 
your points are valid. Customers did contribute significantly towards the 
development of IBM software before it became OCO.  In the mainframe arena there 
isn't a great deal of open source software available (except for the venerable 
CBT Tape).  The open source Linux tools generally require porting, which 
require a mainframe, which most folks don't have at home, so open source isn't 
significant in the mainframe arena.

On a non-mainframe system, if you want to run open source software, have at it. 
(I use Mozilla among other things).

My son in law is a big open source proponent too, but when I asked him why he 
preferred his Mac (another holy war) instead of Linux he couldn't answer.

Bob Shannon
Rocket Software

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 4/10/2013 12:15 AM, John Gilmore wrote:

I think that guarantees are less important than would be an
established process for fixing, promptly, something that proves to be
broken.

There are a very few people whose I "guarantee this app will work" I
would give great weight to, without perhaps believing it quite
literally.  There are no organizations in this category.  An
organizational commitment to fix what is broken may, however, be
believable.

That said, I suspect that such a scheme would not be economically
viable for cheap apps.  What may be possible is a two-level release
scheme.  An app could perhaps be released first as a draft, 'for
testing' one and only later and conditionally upon the community's
experience with it as a definitive, 'for use' one.


In the end of the day it does come down to trust. Why trust a vendor of 
a mainframe tool and not an open source product
when the open source product may have been scrutinised by thousands of 
well credentialed experts.


Didn't products like CICS, VTAM get a massive contribution from 
customers back in the day before OCO.


Open source software runs our daily lives. From our browsers, our 
phones, modems/routers, the servers running this list.



John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Jerry Whitteridge]

We need to remember that the CBT tape products WERE the first "Shareware" and 
used in production in many shops. Then the bean counters started worrying about 
support and got us used to support from "Vendors" rather than reading the dumps 
ourselves and fixing the code we had (OCO any one ?).

However after the acceptance of Linux in the shop I got much more traction on 
using things from the CBT tape with management as they again got used to the 
concept of community support software. I think that the risk just needs to be 
communicated and analyzed correctly. 


I'd love to see more current tooling ported to z/OS - but admit getting the 
company to pay for it would be problematical.

Jerry Whitteridge
Lead Systems Programmer
Safeway Inc.
925 951 4184

If you feel in control
you just aren't going fast enough.


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Lizette Koehler
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 8:47 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost 
utilities?

From my perspective, the mainframe and the open systems (including Mobile
Apps) have different agendas and different concerns.  On the mainframe we
have many things working concurrently (IMS, DB2, CICS, MQ, etc). It seems in
the open systems world the applications are limited to one server (or server
farm).  I am not aware that multiple functions can co-exist on a server.

This is not to say the open systems and mobile apps that do not share these
concerns - however

  The mainframe has massive applications that if they go down the amount of
time to recover the application and/or fix it could take many hours/days
that costs the business income.  Or cause an LPAR wide outage that affects
many more working applications (MQ, DB2, IMS, CICS).  That is bad for the
bottom line.  

  Any "freeware", "Shareware", etc... brought in to a mainframe environment
will eventually become a critical piece of production applications - no
matter how much you say " THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION"

  

  I would suspect that once the old guard is gone - the young pups
supporting the mainframe will start to do exactly what you are proposing and
therefor the mainframe production environment will be more "open"


From observation, it seems the open systems and mobile apps have a higher
tolerance for ported tools and outages - even though it might impact
production, and it does not seem to be as high as a concern.  I have seen
open system apps down for several days because someone used a ported tool
that no one knew was there.   We can see what happened when IBMLINK moved
from a green screen product to a web based application.  And how quickly its
priority for uptime has seemed to lapse.



"Email Firewall" made the following annotations.
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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Skip Robinson]

ZIP is a poignant case. There exists a version of Info-ZIP for z. However, 
our copy circa 2000 identifies the maintainer as one Onno van der Linden. 
The Info-ZIP web site lists him as a ghost: once involved with the project 
but without current contact data. So what shop would want to become 
dependent on a now-13 year old product with, as they say, no visible means 
of support? 

In another case, our shop has standardized on SFTP for secure transfers. A 
few years ago we found an open-source version that worked and appeared to 
have current support. But the Apps folks would not hear of it. They 
insisted that we buy an ISV version. Don't know the details (and would not 
reveal anyway), but we found the commercial version pretty sucky. We had 
to debug it and induce the vendor to make changes. They obviously had--at 
that time--little serious mainframe experience or the means to test their 
product thoroughly. 

I'm not sure what moral these cases embody, but they illustrate the 
difficulty of  taking a real business in an off-the-grid direction. 

.
.
JO.Skip Robinson
Southern California Edison Company
Electric Dragon Team Paddler 
SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager
626-302-7535 Office
323-715-0595 Mobile
jo.skip.robin...@sce.com



From:   Richard Pinion 
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU, 
Date:   10/03/2013 08:35 AM
Subject:    Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low 
cost utilities?
Sent by:IBM Mainframe Discussion List 



I would like to see a free/near free zip program for traditional z/OS data 
sets.
The zip/unzip would do consistency checking, unlike TRSMAIN UNTERSE which 
will
happily unterse a truncated file and give a RC=0.


--- david.griffi...@gmail.com wrote:

From: David Griffiths 
To:   IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost 
utilities?
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 16:15:27 +0100

On 3 October 2013 15:59, Lizette Koehler  wrote:
> I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not 
incorporate them into a production - if this dies the system dies - 
process.  If the tool I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact 
anything but my statistics or analysis functions.


Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is
much of a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For
instance a company buying a $99 copy of Python for their log
processing needs?

Cheers,

Dave



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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John Gilmore]

I think that guarantees are less important than would be an
established process for fixing, promptly, something that proves to be
broken.

There are a very few people whose I "guarantee this app will work" I
would give great weight to, without perhaps believing it quite
literally.  There are no organizations in this category.  An
organizational commitment to fix what is broken may, however, be
believable.

That said, I suspect that such a scheme would not be economically
viable for cheap apps.  What may be possible is a two-level release
scheme.  An app could perhaps be released first as a draft, 'for
testing' one and only later and conditionally upon the community's
experience with it as a definitive, 'for use' one.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 3/10/2013 11:59 PM, Steve Conway wrote:

David said, "To me it's a no-brainer but convincing mainframers to step
outside of their comfort zone is difficult."

I have to disagree, partly, with that.
In the course of my career, I have been forced repeatedly to learn spiffy
new things.  As I started working the mainframe in 1977, it's easy to
grasp the magnitude of changes so many of us have successfully learned and
integrated into our daily routines.
The key here is risk management.  Lizette made the point very well the
seriousness of a mainframe outage.  An outage traced to non-approved
software in production is very likely a career ending event for the people
involved, and possibly their managers.  Then take into account the
business impact.

It's not that we don't want to play with the shiny new toys.  Living in
cardboard boxes is just so unappealing.



I would be far more comfortable having the source code for a tool that I 
was using as opposed to OCO. Take Lua for example, it runs on over 
1billion devices -  phones, TVs, washing machines.
The release I'm using has been stable since 2006. It's not a toy, it 
runs applications that we use in our everyday lives without any dramas.



Cheers,,,Steve

Steven F. Conway, CISSP
LA Systems
z/OS Systems Support
Phone: 703.295.1926
steve_con...@ao.uscourts.gov

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Griffiths]

On 3 October 2013 16:47, Lizette Koehler  wrote:
> So, say I bring in Python for $99 to read logs and I can do that because my
> manager has approval for software purchase under $1000.00 .  And it is
> restricted to my use.  But someone sees me use it, asks to have the same
> thing for their logs, and BOOM, now it is rampant in production and a
> "critical" app.  And it all started out innocently enough.  I believe that
> mainframers have learned over the decades there is no such thing as a
> one-time use or limited to just me ported tool.  Things have a way of
> spreading out quickly and invariably winds up in a critical production path.


Interesting, thanks. Apple of course vet all the apps that appear in
their store. I don't know how extensive that vetting process is, but I
wonder if a similar process would give customers more confidence? (But
stopping short of a "we guarantee this app will work" thing!)

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Steve Conway]

David said, "To me it's a no-brainer but convincing mainframers to step 
outside of their comfort zone is difficult."

I have to disagree, partly, with that.
In the course of my career, I have been forced repeatedly to learn spiffy 
new things.  As I started working the mainframe in 1977, it's easy to 
grasp the magnitude of changes so many of us have successfully learned and 
integrated into our daily routines.
The key here is risk management.  Lizette made the point very well the 
seriousness of a mainframe outage.  An outage traced to non-approved 
software in production is very likely a career ending event for the people 
involved, and possibly their managers.  Then take into account the 
business impact.

It's not that we don't want to play with the shiny new toys.  Living in 
cardboard boxes is just so unappealing.


Cheers,,,Steve

Steven F. Conway, CISSP
LA Systems
z/OS Systems Support
Phone: 703.295.1926
steve_con...@ao.uscourts.gov

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 3/10/2013 11:47 PM, Lizette Koehler wrote:

  The mainframe has massive applications that if they go down the amount of
time to recover the application and/or fix it could take many hours/days
that costs the business income.  Or cause an LPAR wide outage that affects
many more working applications (MQ, DB2, IMS, CICS).  That is bad for the
bottom line.

   Any "freeware", "Shareware", etc... brought in to a mainframe environment
will eventually become a critical piece of production applications - no
matter how much you say " THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION"
But CICS is now touting PHP for CICS applications for mobile devices. 
That's open source software.
To keep up with the Jones the mainframe has to adapt. If a vendor like 
Rocket offer support for the
open source software that's all well and good. But that's still vendor 
lock in isn't it?


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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Lizette Koehler]

>From my perspective, the mainframe and the open systems (including Mobile
Apps) have different agendas and different concerns.  On the mainframe we
have many things working concurrently (IMS, DB2, CICS, MQ, etc). It seems in
the open systems world the applications are limited to one server (or server
farm).  I am not aware that multiple functions can co-exist on a server.

This is not to say the open systems and mobile apps that do not share these
concerns - however

  The mainframe has massive applications that if they go down the amount of
time to recover the application and/or fix it could take many hours/days
that costs the business income.  Or cause an LPAR wide outage that affects
many more working applications (MQ, DB2, IMS, CICS).  That is bad for the
bottom line.  

  Any "freeware", "Shareware", etc... brought in to a mainframe environment
will eventually become a critical piece of production applications - no
matter how much you say " THIS IS NOT FOR PRODUCTION"

  Yes, there is a need for tools.  However, in the past, system programmers
used assembler programs to create those processes and then they mentored
juniors to support that code.  In today's environment, rarely do shops have
assembler programmers, there are not enough young people going into the
Mainframe arena, and management is reluctant to provide the training they
did in the past to be able to support these tools.

  On the mainframe we are also very mindful of resource utilization and
performance.  I cannot place a REXX tool into production because we do not
have the REXX Compiler, and REXX is a resource consumer.  Therefore the
edict is no REXX.  I can have REXX for my personal use.  But I cannot share
the REXX outside of my group.  If REXX goes into production - warning lights
and bells go off and the REXX Police come out and haul you away.

  There is also a concern that when you have an operating system or hardware
upgrade, the "tools" will break.  I had that happen when IBM moved the UCB
Above the line and a 24bit program expected the UCB and not the Address of
the UCB.  It was something we missed in our analysis because we did not know
someone had done that or that it was in production.  Fortunately it was
localized to a few production batch jobs, but it did take a while to
determine why the S0C4 was occurring.

  I would suspect that once the old guard is gone - the young pups
supporting the mainframe will start to do exactly what you are proposing and
therefor the mainframe production environment will be more "open"


So, say I bring in Python for $99 to read logs and I can do that because my
manager has approval for software purchase under $1000.00 .  And it is
restricted to my use.  But someone sees me use it, asks to have the same
thing for their logs, and BOOM, now it is rampant in production and a
"critical" app.  And it all started out innocently enough.  I believe that
mainframers have learned over the decades there is no such thing as a
one-time use or limited to just me ported tool.  Things have a way of
spreading out quickly and invariably winds up in a critical production path.

>From observation, it seems the open systems and mobile apps have a higher
tolerance for ported tools and outages - even though it might impact
production, and it does not seem to be as high as a concern.  I have seen
open system apps down for several days because someone used a ported tool
that no one knew was there.   We can see what happened when IBMLINK moved
from a green screen product to a web based application.  And how quickly its
priority for uptime has seemed to lapse.


Just my two cents worth

Lizette


-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
Behalf Of David Griffiths
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 8:15 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost
utilities?

On 3 October 2013 15:59, Lizette Koehler  wrote:
> I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not
incorporate them into a production - if this dies the system dies - process.
If the tool I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact anything but
my statistics or analysis functions.


Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is much of
a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For instance a company
buying a $99 copy of Python for their log processing needs?

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Elardus Engelbrecht]

Lizette Koehler wrote:

>I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not incorporate 
>them into a production - if this dies the system dies - process.  If the tool 
>I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact anything but my statistics 
>or analysis functions.  Then I try to go and find another process.

Indeed. Everything from CBT Tape is *optional*. If I can't assemble it or it 
does not work, I just drop it. No sweat.

Some free IBM goodies are also available for using (with the usual disclaimer 
and warning about no support).


>I am always looking for products supported by companies that have a good track 
>record so I can replace anything I use from the CBT TAPE; however, that usage 
>is isolated to me and no one else.

Or some of the CBT Tape freebies were incorporate into z/OS at a later stage. 
Think for example those freebies which allows you to dynamically modify a 
Linklist.


>One caveat.  No business is protected from failure.  So even when buying tools 
>from various vendors, there is no guarantee that the vendor will be around 
>tomorrow.  Or that support will be able to fix the problem if they cannot 
>replicate it in-house.

For us, we need guarantee the vendor with a good track record or its reseller 
has an office + staff in our country. 

One vendor closed their office because of their own reasons and appointed a 
reseller. We dropped them and got another vendor because the appointed reseller 
was not reliable/available.

Groete / Greetings
Elardus Engelbrecht

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

On 3/10/2013 11:04 PM, David Griffiths wrote:

On 3 October 2013 15:33, David Crayford  wrote:

Support is important if a customers wants to run open source in production.
But that hasn't stopped the masses. Just look at Linux
and just about every important piece of software of the last decade or so.
It's a tangible idea, but needs to be backed by paid support
just like Rocket are doing with ported tools.

I wonder what level that support needs to be at for people to purchase
and use such apps? Maybe if people could get confidence from seeing
other people's feedback on the "app store" combined with a contact
email address, would that be sufficient in some circumstances?


Anybody can use an open source package for free. If you want support you 
pay. Simple as that. That's a good deal!



z/OS is starved of decent tools. Almost every programming language has it's
roots in the 60s, 70s or 80s. It's time for a change. And I
don't mean Java, which isn't really a step up in terms of productivity.

Agreed. I know Rexx has a lot of fans for instance but few outside the
mainframe world. Would be good to see modern alternatives such as Lua.


It's no secret that I ported Lua because I yap on about it enough! But 
that's not because I'm motived by self-promotion. My point is, hey, here 
is something really good to do interesting stuff
that your current tool set cannot. It's backed by a huge community and 
people are contributing all the time. It's alive, it's kicking and it 
can make your life better. To me it's a
no-brainer but convincing mainframers to step outside of their comfort 
zone is difficult.



Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

In my experience, eventually almost anything useful becomes production
critical. Some programmer will eventually get their hands on it and
integrate it directly into a mission critical process.


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 10:15 AM, David Griffiths
wrote:

> On 3 October 2013 15:59, Lizette Koehler  wrote:
> > I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not
> incorporate them into a production - if this dies the system dies -
> process.  If the tool I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact
> anything but my statistics or analysis functions.
>
>
> Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is
> much of a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For
> instance a company buying a $99 copy of Python for their log
> processing needs?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>



-- 
I have _not_ lost my mind! It is backed up on a flash drive somewhere.

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Richard Pinion]

I would like to see a free/near free zip program for traditional z/OS data sets.
The zip/unzip would do consistency checking, unlike TRSMAIN UNTERSE which will
happily unterse a truncated file and give a RC=0.


--- david.griffi...@gmail.com wrote:

From: David Griffiths 
To:   IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost 
utilities?
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 16:15:27 +0100

On 3 October 2013 15:59, Lizette Koehler  wrote:
> I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not incorporate 
> them into a production - if this dies the system dies - process.  If the tool 
> I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact anything but my statistics 
> or analysis functions.


Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is
much of a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For
instance a company buying a $99 copy of Python for their log
processing needs?

Cheers,

Dave

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_
Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Griffiths]

On 3 October 2013 15:59, Lizette Koehler  wrote:
> I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not incorporate 
> them into a production - if this dies the system dies - process.  If the tool 
> I have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact anything but my statistics 
> or analysis functions.


Do you think that - along the lines of the CBT Tape - that there is
much of a potential market for non-production-critical tools? For
instance a company buying a $99 copy of Python for their log
processing needs?

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Griffiths]

On 3 October 2013 13:23, John McKown  wrote:

> Of course, one problem with this is "where the
> individual is doing the development?" question.

Yes, that's absolutely key! But solvable I think.

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Griffiths]

On 3 October 2013 15:33, David Crayford  wrote:
> Support is important if a customers wants to run open source in production.
> But that hasn't stopped the masses. Just look at Linux
> and just about every important piece of software of the last decade or so.
> It's a tangible idea, but needs to be backed by paid support
> just like Rocket are doing with ported tools.

I wonder what level that support needs to be at for people to purchase
and use such apps? Maybe if people could get confidence from seeing
other people's feedback on the "app store" combined with a contact
email address, would that be sufficient in some circumstances?

> z/OS is starved of decent tools. Almost every programming language has it's
> roots in the 60s, 70s or 80s. It's time for a change. And I
> don't mean Java, which isn't really a step up in terms of productivity.

Agreed. I know Rexx has a lot of fans for instance but few outside the
mainframe world. Would be good to see modern alternatives such as Lua.

Cheers,

Dave

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Kirk Wolf]

David Crayford is spot on.

FWIW, I wrote this in 2009 on this topic:
http://oss4zos.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Original_oss4zos_manifesto

CBT is fantastic, but the idea behind the oss4zos.org site was about
organizing a community to port FOSS Unix software to z/OS.
This never got much traction, although Timothy Sipples did some nice work
organizing the site.

I would advocate two things:
1) A community that ports FOSS software to z/OS.  All patches are open
source and contributed up-stream if possible

2) Vendors can package selected parts and add value and support

This is how FOSS works everywhere else.  No one has convinced me that it
wouldn't work on z/OS if there were sufficient demand.   What IBM did with
"IBM Ported Tools" was to offer (2), but skip (1).   And NO GPL licensed
packages were included.

If anyone is interested in contributing to the Wiki, please send an
introductory email to i...@dovetail.com and we will create a userid for you.
(We didn't enable self-enrollment so as to keep out nasty wiki spammers)


Kirk Wolf
Dovetailed Technologies
http://dovetail.com


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 9:33 AM, David Crayford  wrote:

> Support is important if a customers wants to run open source in
> production. But that hasn't stopped the masses. Just look at Linux
> and just about every important piece of software of the last decade or so.
> It's a tangible idea, but needs to be backed by paid support
> just like Rocket are doing with ported tools.
>
> z/OS is starved of decent tools. Almost every programming language has
> it's roots in the 60s, 70s or 80s. It's time for a change. And I
> don't mean Java, which isn't really a step up in terms of productivity.
>
>
> On 3/10/2013 7:39 PM, David Griffiths wrote:
>
>> Hi, I'd like to find out how much interest there would be in a wider
>> range and more up to date ports of common open source software
>> utilities and also more low cost utilities. Kind of like a z/OS "app
>> store" where customers could go to easily purchase or download for
>> free such small programs. (Leaving to one side for now the question of
>> how we get there!)
>>
>> Would a mainframe client consider using software (applications, tools,
>> utilities, etc) in an app store like model, where the product
>> roadmaps, support, or updates are less well established, too risky?
>> Does your company have policies today that would preclude you from
>> using software in this model?
>>
>> (Disclaimer: I work for IBM but am canvassing opinion in a completely
>> unofficial capacity.)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> PS: apologies if you've seen this message before - I thought the
>> google group was a gateway to this list!
>>
>> --**--**
>> --
>> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
>> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>>
>
> --**--**--
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>

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Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[Lizette Koehler]

 Most shops I have worked at do not want to bring in any product that has only 
a small support group.  For example, if a product is developed that has a real 
benefit - but it is from Sally's Software firm.  But Sally is the only person 
for support and sales, then they will not look at it because they believed it 
would not last past the time that Sally could no longer support it.

I think the question comes down to:  Is it cost effective to invest in a 
function that may have a limited life span.  What happens if it becomes 
imbedded in production and then when it breaks, our production goes down and 
there is no one on the staff to support it?

So some of the larger organizations would not be willing to invest unless they 
could see the lifecycle of the product and creator (be it business or 
individual)

I have several downloads I use from the CBT Tape.  But I do not incorporate 
them into a production - if this dies the system dies - process.  If the tool I 
have from the CBT TAPE dies, it does not impact anything but my statistics or 
analysis functions.  Then I try to go and find another process.

I am always looking for products supported by companies that have a good track 
record so I can replace anything I use from the CBT TAPE; however, that usage 
is isolated to me and no one else.

One caveat.  No business is protected from failure.  So even when buying tools 
from various vendors, there is no guarantee that the vendor will be around 
tomorrow.  Or that support will be able to fix the problem if they cannot 
replicate it in-house.



Lizette
 

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of John McKown
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 5:24 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost 
utilities?

The only "problem" with the CBTTAPE is that it is really only for _free_
($0.00 cost), "open source" type software. I am not really aware of any of the 
contributions which are "binary executables and support files" only. I don't 
know of a way to have something like the Apple, Google, or Amazon "app" store 
where you actually pay real money and receive an executable.

I am not sure, but it appears that David is looking at something where some of 
us "in the field" could write something very useful. And then publish it via 
the "z/OS app store" in order to make some money. It would be an interesting 
way to encourage the individual practitioner to transition into being a small 
ISV. Of course, one problem with this is "where the individual is doing the 
development?" question. If they are doing it on their employer's machine, then 
the employer likely has some rights to the software. Most of the Apple/Android 
apps are developed on a person's own PC, and so there is not really any 
question about who "owns" it. Since IBM does _not_ supply a free/low cost way 
to have your own z machine with software, this is not likely to catch on. As 
much as I like it. Might be interesting if IBM had a z/OS system that they 
maintained on which an individual could afford to have their own account, like 
in the old days of "time sharing". Of course, IBM (on the z at least) has 
little or no interest in any "product" which does not have a high "markup". So 
I doubt this is going to happen.

>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] 
> On Behalf Of David Griffiths
> Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 2:39 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost 
> utilities?
>
> Hi, I'd like to find out how much interest there would be in a wider 
> range and more up to date ports of common open source software 
> utilities and also more low cost utilities. Kind of like a z/OS "app 
> store" where customers could go to easily purchase or download for free such 
> small programs.
> (Leaving to one side for now the question of how we get there!)
>
> Would a mainframe client consider using software (applications, tools, 
> utilities, etc) in an app store like model, where the product 
> roadmaps, support, or updates are less well established, too risky?
> Does your company have policies today that would preclude you from 
> using software in this model?
>
> (Disclaimer: I work for IBM but am canvassing opinion in a completely 
> unofficial capacity.)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave
>
> PS: apologies if you've seen this message before - I thought the 
> google group was a gateway to this list! 

--
I have _not_ lost my mind! It is backed up on a flash drive somewhere.

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

---

Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[David Crayford]

Support is important if a customers wants to run open source in 
production. But that hasn't stopped the masses. Just look at Linux
and just about every important piece of software of the last decade or 
so. It's a tangible idea, but needs to be backed by paid support

just like Rocket are doing with ported tools.

z/OS is starved of decent tools. Almost every programming language has 
it's roots in the 60s, 70s or 80s. It's time for a change. And I

don't mean Java, which isn't really a step up in terms of productivity.

On 3/10/2013 7:39 PM, David Griffiths wrote:

Hi, I'd like to find out how much interest there would be in a wider
range and more up to date ports of common open source software
utilities and also more low cost utilities. Kind of like a z/OS "app
store" where customers could go to easily purchase or download for
free such small programs. (Leaving to one side for now the question of
how we get there!)

Would a mainframe client consider using software (applications, tools,
utilities, etc) in an app store like model, where the product
roadmaps, support, or updates are less well established, too risky?
Does your company have policies today that would preclude you from
using software in this model?

(Disclaimer: I work for IBM but am canvassing opinion in a completely
unofficial capacity.)

Cheers,

Dave

PS: apologies if you've seen this message before - I thought the
google group was a gateway to this list!

--
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN


--
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send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[John McKown]

The only "problem" with the CBTTAPE is that it is really only for _free_
($0.00 cost), "open source" type software. I am not really aware of any of
the contributions which are "binary executables and support files" only. I
don't know of a way to have something like the Apple, Google, or Amazon
"app" store where you actually pay real money and receive an executable.

I am not sure, but it appears that David is looking at something where some
of us "in the field" could write something very useful. And then publish it
via the "z/OS app store" in order to make some money. It would be an
interesting way to encourage the individual practitioner to transition into
being a small ISV. Of course, one problem with this is "where the
individual is doing the development?" question. If they are doing it on
their employer's machine, then the employer likely has some rights to the
software. Most of the Apple/Android apps are developed on a person's own
PC, and so there is not really any question about who "owns" it. Since IBM
does _not_ supply a free/low cost way to have your own z machine with
software, this is not likely to catch on. As much as I like it. Might be
interesting if IBM had a z/OS system that they maintained on which an
individual could afford to have their own account, like in the old days of
"time sharing". Of course, IBM (on the z at least) has little or no
interest in any "product" which does not have a high "markup". So I doubt
this is going to happen.


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 6:59 AM, גדי בן אבי  wrote:

> We use a few products that are freeware like XMITIP or the free version of
> Service Pilot NBA (formerly TDSLINK).
> There a few others.
>
> The CBTTAPE site is a great source for these types of products.
>
> I'm not sure we need something else.
>
> Gadi
>
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of David Griffiths
> Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 2:39 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost
> utilities?
>
> Hi, I'd like to find out how much interest there would be in a wider range
> and more up to date ports of common open source software utilities and also
> more low cost utilities. Kind of like a z/OS "app store" where customers
> could go to easily purchase or download for free such small programs.
> (Leaving to one side for now the question of how we get there!)
>
> Would a mainframe client consider using software (applications, tools,
> utilities, etc) in an app store like model, where the product roadmaps,
> support, or updates are less well established, too risky?
> Does your company have policies today that would preclude you from using
> software in this model?
>
> (Disclaimer: I work for IBM but am canvassing opinion in a completely
> unofficial capacity.)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave
>
> PS: apologies if you've seen this message before - I thought the google
> group was a gateway to this list!
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email
> to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>
> לשימת לבך, בהתאם לנהלי החברה וזכויות החתימה בה, כל הצעה, התחייבות או מצג
> מטעם החברה, מחייבים מסמך נפרד וחתום על ידי מורשי החתימה של החברה, הנושא את
> לוגו החברה או שמה המודפס ובצירוף חותמת החברה. בהעדר מסמך כאמור (לרבות מסמך
> סרוק) המצורף להודעת דואר אלקטרוני זאת, אין לראות באמור בהודעה אלא משום
> טיוטה לדיון,
> ואין להסתמך עליה לביצוע פעולה עסקית או משפטית כלשהי.
>
>
> Please note that in accordance with Malam's signatory rights, no offer,
> agreement, concession or representation is binding on the company,
> unless accompanied by a duly signed separate document (or a scanned
> version thereof), affixed with the company's seal.
>
> --
> For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
>



-- 
I have _not_ lost my mind! It is backed up on a flash drive somewhere.

Maranatha! <><
John McKown

--
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Re: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

[גדי בן אבי]

We use a few products that are freeware like XMITIP or the free version of 
Service Pilot NBA (formerly TDSLINK).
There a few others.

The CBTTAPE site is a great source for these types of products.

I'm not sure we need something else.

Gadi

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of David Griffiths
Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 2:39 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Interested in up to date open source software or low cost utilities?

Hi, I'd like to find out how much interest there would be in a wider range and 
more up to date ports of common open source software utilities and also more 
low cost utilities. Kind of like a z/OS "app store" where customers could go to 
easily purchase or download for free such small programs. (Leaving to one side 
for now the question of how we get there!)

Would a mainframe client consider using software (applications, tools, 
utilities, etc) in an app store like model, where the product roadmaps, 
support, or updates are less well established, too risky?
Does your company have policies today that would preclude you from using 
software in this model?

(Disclaimer: I work for IBM but am canvassing opinion in a completely 
unofficial capacity.)

Cheers,

Dave

PS: apologies if you've seen this message before - I thought the google group 
was a gateway to this list!

--
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to 
lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

לשימת לבך, בהתאם לנהלי החברה וזכויות החתימה בה, כל הצעה, התחייבות או מצג מטעם 
החברה, מחייבים מסמך נפרד וחתום על ידי מורשי החתימה של החברה, הנושא את לוגו 
החברה או שמה המודפס ובצירוף חותמת החברה. בהעדר מסמך כאמור (לרבות מסמך סרוק) 
המצורף להודעת דואר אלקטרוני זאת, אין לראות באמור בהודעה אלא משום טיוטה לדיון,
ואין להסתמך עליה לביצוע פעולה עסקית או משפטית כלשהי.


Please note that in accordance with Malam's signatory rights, no offer, 
agreement, concession or representation is binding on the company,
unless accompanied by a duly signed separate document (or a scanned version 
thereof), affixed with the company's seal.

--
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN