Re: News - Commercial Version of Hercules - Turbo Hercules

> Mike Schwab wrote:

><snip>

> I think Turbo Hercules is asking for z/OS to be licensed to
> customers at roughly the same $/MSU rate as the lowest mainframe
> rate.  A single processor z/800 would be about 100 MIPS, z/10 about
> 200 MIPS, Hercules about 50 MIPS per thread.

While it may have started that way, and would make sense to most if not all economy minded mainframe folks, IBM quickly escalated to the point of providing a hodge-podge list of patents which may not have anything to do with Hercules at all.

><snip>

> Almost all Operating Systems are used in all countries.  Some
> Operating systems support fewer languages that others.

Is IBM implying that the z10 instruction set, or portions thereof, is patented so that no one else can use it without cross license agreements.  Would that mean customer written software or 3rd party vendor software, think LINUX here, violates the instruction patent.  If z/OS or other licensed OS is run then the customer is already paying for such usage.  If only LINUX is run on a open source software emulator, does IBM expect to be able to obtain some type of royality fee since 'their' instruction set is being utilized ?

Reminds me of Intel and AMD utilizing the same instructions on the x86 line of processors.  They initially had cross license agreements ( 1976 ), Intel withdraws some agreements ( 1987 ), Intel sues for copyright infringement after AMD produces an independent 386 ( 1991 ), Supreme Court of California upholds arbitrator's decision in favor of AMD for full rights to make and sell their 386 version ( 1994 ).

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_12670_12686,00.html

Legal actions follow on for years until, November 2009.  Itel and AMD agree to end all legal disputes between the two including anti-trust action and cross patent disputes.  Intel pays $1.25 Billion dollars to AMD and agrees to abide by a set of business practice provisions.  Guess that could mean just about anything, but sounds almost like capitulation of some sort.

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-press-release-2009nov12.aspx

Don't know much about the future of all this stuff, but locked in customers, be they large like government, financial, transportation, or small like a university or software developer shops might someday run their legacy load modules on a cheapo-pc after running the module through the OEM-2-Native translator ( one time shot, subsequent runs use the new executable ).  Then the software might run at almost native host speed.

Phil - some company was specializing in something like this I think