[nylug-talk] Is there any overlap in the NYC Linux community with Solaris?

[H. G.]

On 5/16/07, Brian Gupta <brian.gupta at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ....To that end I wanted to learn z/OS hands on.
>
> Guess what, I would have had to pay over 100K to buy a tiny PC-sized
> IBM micro-mainframe that is compatible with your big iron + OS
> licensing fees. If you want to put your money where your mouth is
> please stop suing people that are making affordable mainframe
> emulators and clones, and open source all of your mainframe operating
> systems and software. For that matter why don't you release an open
> source package for the PC that includes a mainframe emulator, (with
> device emulation), and z/OS. It would be really cool, because then we
> could play with 390-linux without having to have access to real
> hardware.
>
> -brian


The man makes a very strong point.  As much as IBM supports open
source software,
including Linux, they haven't stepped out as far as Sun and put their
very nest eggs
(in Sun's case, the Solaris OS, the Java platform,
their processor specs) out in the open.

Key words here being " _nest eggs_ ".  These products are Sun mainstays;
Java especially.
This is a move whose significance shouldn't be overlooked.
Partially open source is better than _not_ open source at all.

Regardless of the many flaws that exist in Solaris and Java, at the very
least with their release
to the community, we can now do something about them.

I can understand IBM's hesitancy about open sourcing the systems which
international banks
rely on, or about the difficulty of making mainframe level software
available to folks who don't have
access to that kind of hardware, but at the very least some sort of move,
anything, such as Gupta's
suggestion above (an open source emulator) would be nice.

If something like that *does* exist, I'd be happy to stand corrected.