Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 23, 2006 06:36 AM
It's interesting. I work for IBM; one of our products is zOS, used to be called MVS, a mainframe operating system.
If you think of personal computers as 'bi-planes', then mainframes are the 'cruise liners' of the computing world; both provide transportation services, but you use them for different purposes.
Taking a core dump on zOS is like taking a planet out of orbit; not something to be done lightly.
Customers buy our products becuase of the rock-solid guarantee; for the sort of prices we charge, they expect 24x7 coverage by real people who know what they are doing.
zOS is a long way away from 'open source'. But we do have to have people who understand how it works, who know (becuase even zOS is not perfect) how to diagnose problems, how to revise it. In short, people who know how to do to zOS, the kind of things that skilled open-source programmers do to Linux.
And the people who constructed zOS are getting old, retiring. We are having to recruit new people, spot aptitude, train them, so that we can keep offering the guarantee. The customers expect it that way.
So, we cheerfully sell these mainframes with zOS, or with zLinux, or zVM, or all of the above.
We don't really mind whether our customers want the 'commercial' operating system, or the 'free' operating system; so long as they buy something from us. There's lots of other things we sell. If they think it supports their business, then we will sign contracts to guarantee it, and then it will support their business.
But zOS is cheaper for us to maintain than zLinux.
It's a 'maintenance cost' thing. Not a 'keep the source hidden' thing.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 23, 2006 06:36 AMIf you think of personal computers as 'bi-planes', then mainframes are the 'cruise liners' of the computing world; both provide transportation services, but you use them for different purposes.
Taking a core dump on zOS is like taking a planet out of orbit; not something to be done lightly.
Customers buy our products becuase of the rock-solid guarantee; for the sort of prices we charge, they expect 24x7 coverage by real people who know what they are doing.
zOS is a long way away from 'open source'. But we do have to have people who understand how it works, who know (becuase even zOS is not perfect) how to diagnose problems, how to revise it. In short, people who know how to do to zOS, the kind of things that skilled open-source programmers do to Linux.
And the people who constructed zOS are getting old, retiring. We are having to recruit new people, spot aptitude, train them, so that we can keep offering the guarantee. The customers expect it that way.
So, we cheerfully sell these mainframes with zOS, or with zLinux, or zVM, or all of the above.
We don't really mind whether our customers want the 'commercial' operating system, or the 'free' operating system; so long as they buy something from us. There's lots of other things we sell. If they think it supports their business, then we will sign contracts to guarantee it, and then it will support their business.
But zOS is cheaper for us to maintain than zLinux.
It's a 'maintenance cost' thing. Not a 'keep the source hidden' thing.
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