Re: Peter still in misery (was: Jan doesn't want Peter to know (was: Peter wants

> True, perhaps.  Depends on how Amdahl came by the information. 
> Especially if it was information that Amdahl could have reasonably
> deduced on thier own -- might have been the basis of a good defence
> (or at least a lot of costly land-shark battles).

As I've said, corporate counsel on both sides tried to avoid 
litigation almost at all costs.  Once a development process goes to 
the lawyers it effectively stops - and the market carries on.

One instance was CFCC.  IBM wanted a horrendous amount for the 
specifications, so Amdahl reverse-engineered it.  The next version 
came along, and the process repeated.  Finally - with margin and cost 
pressures mounting - Amdahl decided to buy the next specification.  
IBM then stated the information was cumulative - Amdahl had to 
license all the versions they'd reverse engineered in order to get 
the specifications for the latest version.  So they reverse-
engineered it again.

> IBM (or the owners of zSeries in particular) is the 800-pound 
gorilla.
>  At the moment, said gorilla is still sufficiently intimidating that
> it has some power.  Eventually, however, it will not be too long
> before *everyone* realises that the 800-pound gorilla is really 
just a
> big, fat, slow, ugly ape.

Internally or externally?  The view is different.  IBM is involved in 
a lot of market sectors - most of them earn gross margins in the mid-
twenties percentiles.  Mainframe software earns 84% - so it has a 
great deal of senior management attention and carries a great deal of 
weight (some, like me, think too much) at Management Committee level.
 
> IBM (again, zSeries specifically) should be glad that there are 
still
> people out there who *want* to pirate zSeries systems[1].  It means
> that there is still interest out there.  Unfortunately, it looks 
like
> this interest is being interpreted as justification that the line is
> as popular as it has always been, and the 'flagship' needs to be
> treated as it always has been.  This could not be further from the 
truth.

Not sure.  There has been an upturn in the Assembler training market 
in the UK that I would have thought impossible at the beginning of 
the year.  I know of sixteen new Assembler programmers trained in the 
last two months by one UK training company alone.

> If IBM wants zSeries to persist, they have no excuse for behaving in
> the way they are: both manufacturers of plug-compatible hardware 
have
> left the market, and there appear to be considerable barriers to new
> players entering the market.  This begins to sound like
> anti-competitive behaviour, a game that a company with IBM's history
> should know better than to play[2].

You can be as anti-competitive as you like as long as you fail the 
tests for market dominance.

> The more I think about this, the more I feel that IBM feeds tidbits 
to
> Payne et al, ...

Heh!  I WISH!  I probably trigger more investigations inside IBM than 
everyone else put together.

> Hang on, I must be wrong: what happened to Phil's iron-clad
> prediction that Hercules would be issued a 'cease-and-desist'
> 1Q2002?

I don't remember it being 'iron-clad' - I no longer have access to 
the archives but I'm sure someone can find what I said back then.

> Fact is: NO-ONE OUTSIDE IBM CAN SPEAK FOR IBM, OR OFFER THE
> OPINION OF IBM.  Not me.  Not any Hercules developer.  Not
> anyone on this list.

They're doing a pretty good job if you read the signs.  The removal 
of the Redbook chapter, the flat statement on the Partnerworld pages 
and now the form of words they're consistently using when asked for a 
commercial license.  All their moves are in the same direction.

I appreciate Jay's point about 'credible evidence'.  It would be nice 
to see something on headed paper.  I don't have that, but I have an 
account of it from a source I've trusted for years.  I don't know 
what the current RFA contains or even concerns, but we should know 
within a month or two.  One possibility is that IBM will officially 
announce z/FLEX as an IBM product with a similar licensing statement 
to the Partnerworld one.  The complication in that would be UMX.

> If and when IBM wants a pound of flesh from Hercules, they will make
> it known.  In the meantime I'm going to continue to use Hercules to
> develop Linux/390 solutions, and spend as much time as possible
> getting as far away from z/OS as I can.  They've already lost me, 
I'm
> afraid.

No, you're entirely within their strategy.  The z/OS world is mis-
priced and impossible to correct - IBM should really drop its zSeries 
pricing by a factor of around five, but they can't afford the margin 
loss involved.  The z/OS pricing initiatives (z/OS.e, etc.) come from 
the zSeries product house, who 'own' z/OS but not the other software 
such as middleware.

Moving to Linux/390 will be a process gradual enough to allow IBM to 
acclimatise to the Linux price level.


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