Re: Re: slanted article "Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson"

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 08:13:39PM -0500, Paul Raulerson wrote:
> On Sep 24, 2010, at 7:08 PM, Jay Maynard wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 06:48:25PM -0500, Paul Raulerson wrote:
> > > Now where exactly does Hercules have any of those issues? Indeed, IBM has
> > > largely ignored it, which indeed, may be one measure of determining that
> > > it does NOT have those faults.
> > No, they've largely ignored Hercuels because they know quite well the PR
> > disaster that going after it would generate.
> What PR disaster?

"IBM Squashes Open Source Project!"

IBM has invested a lot of time, effort, and money into making themselves out
to be the good guys in the open source world. To squash Hercules would be to
largely destroy that in one stroke.

> Just how many mainframers do you think there are in the world, and how
> many of them are advocates of Hercules? Admittedly, pretty much every
> Hercules advocate is a mainframer, but the reverse is not true.

Wrong question. It's not the mainframers that count here. It's the open
source folks who have adopted IBM in one way or another.

> Have you used z/PDT?  I seriously doubt it is going commercial. For one
> thing, there is really no \ money in it for IBM. For another, it is a bit
> of a support nightmare for them, since it is difficult indeed to get the
> thing running without some serious performance humps.

Nope. Don't have a spare $3K.

> Well, I should think the answer is obvious. It would not be an open source
> package any longer.  At least some part of it - some critical part - would
> not.
> 
> I told you it would not be particularly palatable.

s/not be particularly palatable/be flatly impossible/

To take any portion of Hercules out of the open source world would destroy
the project. There's no way in hell it will happen, period.

> > That's a technical "solution" to a marketing problem, and as with any such,
> > it's doomed to failure.
> Huh- says who? Technical solutions to marketing problems are the ONLY kind of 
> solutions that actually work.

Do you work in marketing?

Any techie knows that technical solutions fix technical problems, and
marketing problems need marketing solutions. This is the lesson the RIAA
refuses to learn.

> > At this point, the only thing that will result in Hercules being accepted by
> > IBM is regulatory action. They've had 10 years to embrace it, and have done
> > the exact opposite. If they were going to embrace it, z/PDT wouldn't exist.
> Well, we have different opinions. 

Obviously.
-- 
Jay Maynard, K5ZC                   http://www.conmicro.com
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com      http://www.tronguy.net
http://www.hercules-390.org               (Yes, that's me!)
Buy Hercules stuff at http://www.cafepress.com/hercules-390