Tweet
All this to promote a free operating system to which anything they add must be made available as open source. Microsoft and Sun are going to compete with their proprietary operating systems to IBM's new allegedly "open" philosophy. How does one have unique, competitive advantage products with open software? You can't. But IBM says it's the middleware, stupid, not the OS. Websphere and MQSeries running across any OS, where OS should be an open source commodity according to IBM. This from a company that would never open up OS/400, AIX, or MVS, or would they? If not, just how do they go about running in the future under Linux? They can't stay open and compete with Windows or Solaris, who just happen to have leaders that understand the value of an operating system. Could be because they're technical leaders, not marketing droids... Ralph
-
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
At what point did "Open" mean "Good"? I must've missed that. -
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
Give the dude the iSeries (nee 400) account for gosh sakes. bobhComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
Of course, the flaw in this argument is that there's also getting to be a lot of open-source and free middleware out there. As a WebSphere App Server alternative, there's also the Tomcat Web Application Server from Apache's Jakarta Project (http://jakarta.apache.org/). In addition, there's also the SwiftMQ router (http://www.swiftmq.com ) that could be a good substitute for MQSeries. If you want enterprise Java Beans with your Tomcat server, you can also go to the jBoss Enterprise Beans application server (http://www.jboss.org ). There's a lot of open source middleware out there that's starting to come to the fore. So, if you're cultivating people to use an open source OS while trying to sell closed-source middleware, when happens when all your open-source converts discover the open-source middleware?Interesting, no?Ralph Daugherty <Ralph_Daugherty@forums.midrangecomputing.com> wrote in message news:1e5382e9.0@WebX.WawyahGHajS...But IBM says it's the middleware, stupid, not the OS. Websphere and MQSeries running across any OS, where OS should be an open source commodity according to IBM.Comment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
I agree, Joe. Very interesting. I would go further and argue that any success that IBM has in promoting the open source Linux will naturally extend to a promotion and acceptance of open source middleware as well. After all, IBM also helps subsidize and promote the open source client side of the OS as well, such as Gnome. There would have to be a tremendous unique value to IBM's middleware to choose that closed source connection to an otherwise open source environment. Given that the middleware is primarily oriented around J2EE standards, it is exceedingly difficult to conform to those standards while providing enough unique differentiation to compete not only against open source equivalents but competitors meeting the same standards at inevitably lower price points if necessary. This is the model to bet the company on? Proprietary operating systems are dead, but proprietary middleware isn't? Replacing the wide array of unique IBM operating system based solutions with one product, Websphere, with an already open source equivalent in Apache Tomcat available? Quite frankly, if this were proposed as an MBA business case analysis it would be laughed out of class, if they all understood the technology involved. But it's technical enough that it can have the aura of the Internet wrapped around it and fly through unscathed. Thousands of former dot com ventures launched with about the same kind of business case. At some point IBM needs to understand the difference between the proprietary gem it has in the AS/400 in terms of unique architectual features versus the open standard interfaces that allow that gem to interface with the open world. How much damage will be done by then, though? Is all we need is an RPG compiler under Linux and some OS/400 object emulations to have the same experience we have with the AS/400? As long as we don't have a visual interface for the AS/400, it makes it very difficult not to be swept away with the force of IBM's arguments for Linux. RalphComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
Sadly, I read the IBM Redpiece on Linux on iSeries this evening (http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg246232.pdf). Sadly, because I didn't know what IBM was doing to the AS/400 with Linux. Even more sadly, now I know. I have often questioned the direction of IBM's moves with the AS/400, but now there are very specific assumptions to question that perhaps system veterans could shed some light on. If any sense can be made of these IBM assumptions, then these LPAR and integrated server moves will be justified. If they don't make anymore sense to you than to me, then IBM has a solution that's groping for a problem and not finding much of anything. The Linux on iSeries is more of the same of the integrated NT servers initiative, but even more integrated. The benefit of running Linux on an AS/400 is generally summarized as server consolidation. This includes: 1) "Running multiple copies of Linux in partitions instead of on different hardware CPU's." 2) "Ability to save Linux data in an AS/400 scheduled backup." 3) "Access to large amounts of DASD." 4) "Access to the AS/400 CD-ROM drive and tape drive." 5) "iSeries hardware and OS/400 provide a hardware/sofware platform of proven stability and world-class performance." This unusual and, of course. unacceptable (to any Linux person) symbiotic relationship between OS/400 and Linux has some tradeoffs for the benefit?? of sapping the AS/400's CPU and I/O performance to share such outrageously expensive hardware as PowerPC CPU's, hard drives, tape drives, and that rarest of all specimens, the CD-ROM drive. In exchange for entering a time tunnel to the 1960's and integrating (that is, making all of this dependent on each other) access to such valuable hardware, OS/400 is required to boot up Linux and an AS/400 IPL brings Linux down. There is no linkage between the OS/400 and Linux partitions except for a "virtual LAN" over which sockets programming can be run. The normal IBM linkage that we have to look forward to is "virtual" Opticonnect, which of course also runs over a real LAN. There is no ODBC or JDBC between the partitions, but if there ever was, in my opinion it would be a DDM like fakeout with proxies onn each end connected by sockets communications. I contend that there is absolutely not one bit of benefit to Linux on iSeries versus running Linux on the fastest PC clusters you can get your hands on and performing the same sockets programming against the AS/400 as you would from the AS/400 Linux partition. Oh by the way, server consolidation? You ought to see the administration section of this redpiece. Not only must there be both OS/400 and Linux administration expertise, and I mean full blown admin knowledge for both OS'es, but there is a special synching procedure when attempting to restore OS/400 and Linux partitions that will warm your cockles. The Linux piece is right out of the Unix man pages, same stuff that you see with any Linux install. The extra parms to regular AS/400 commands make this a situation that neither normal Linux or normal AS/400 administrators are able to deal with with their present knowledge. And not one Linux person will ever work on a system where it's a "guest" and OS/400 boots it up and takes it down when it goes down. They would ask the obvious question "Why in the heck would you do that?" as, of course, we all are. I leave this excerpt for last (my comments in parentheses): "X Windows (mainly KDE and Gnome) provides a graphical user interface to Linux, where you can run GUI of any kind. If you can use the X Windows programs (wierd way of saying if you have an X Windows client installed), a whole new world is opened for the iSeries system (wierd way of saying AS/400). Instead of only being able to run programs using 5250 display emulation, you could have graphical user interface being run natively (???) on the iSeries. These should of course be programs running in the Linux partition." So with this I am going to move on to concentrating on writing KDE (a Win32 like C++ Linux library interface) and Java 2 programs (Mac OS now has an excellent Java 2 JDM supporting the new Aqua GUI), along with web page development as appropriate of course in my personal endeavors, which has nothing to do with my day job of writing RPG for a retail chain. The writing is on the wall, and whether Linux is run in a partition or a company actually springs for a PC to run it instead of buying more AS/400, hard as that may be to believe, the same programming will take place. It is useless to even attempt to understand or influence what IBM is doing any longer. RPG dataq server programs that handle sockets, relayed through other operating systems, to clients on yet other operating systems; web pages served from a web server or servlet server running within OS/400; and our green screens together must somehow make sense for AS/400 application development. I can no longer make any sense of it. I'll just write code for whatever and let it shake out in the market. Good luck to the AS/400. Regards, Ralph ralph@ee.netComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
"It is useless to even attempt to understand or influence what IBM is doing any longer." ------------------------------------------------------- Ralph - I, personally, haven't given up on the understanding part. I can't. My site needs to make a decision on which consultant and which direction to go with on web site development soon. However, I do share your frustrations in attempting to decipher whatever it is that IBM is trying to tell us. There are just too many untried, untested, unproven, expensive, changing alternatives. It will take time for it to shake out in the marketplace. In the meantime, I am becoming more and more open to the possibility of a non-iSeries front end for web hosting. Continuing to out source the web front end is also looking better as the weeks roll by. IBM and their business partners have yet to convince me that they have our Internet solution. We are scheduled to hear from a Microsoft business partner next week. We need to decide which consulting firm to work with and which approach makes the most sense for our web site development soon. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and frustrations with the rest of us and I realize that you did not say that web site development is useless. I'm just trying to get more people to comment on these difficult issues.Comment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
I wouldn't be too concerned about it Ralph. As of this point no one can do much with Linux anyway, so there will not be a lot of orders for the product. From a business perspective it would be difficult if not impossible to justify the purchase. DaveComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
Well, Frank, I'm going to concentrate harder on thinking about how we can compete using 5250 emulation against the client front end ERP's that sell now, which don't run on the AS/400, but as far as just a web site integrated with the AS/400 goes, I had no problem writing the Jobs400 site with another programmer last year in 3 months. If you've visited it you would see it has as many or more features than Monster or Dice, and it's running pretty much the way we programmed it several months go. That was it. Six man months. Has mostly ILE RPG, but also an RPG III server and a Java server. Could have all been done in any one of those languages or COBOL or C. On top of that, I also mentioned the commercial catalog site available from the same people (BusinessLink Strategi). IBM has a Websphere catalog site, I'm sure others do as well, and you have seen in these posts that Joe Pluta has made it very straightforward to develop web page generation that ties right into your RPG code (if he could note his web site to download the code and mention his book, I'd appreciate it), as well as other AS/400 ecommerce development method books such as eRPG from Midrange Computing and News/400. You've been looking at this stuff and asking very good questions for awhile now. What's the problem? Microsoft? Don't you understand that all that is is an IIS web server under NT? The only integration to the AS/400 will be with ODBC. What makes this so tempting to people? Reminds me, this leads me to my response to Dave.... RalphComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
If they can get the socketing between the partitions to be transparent in our programming, Dave, it could be a valuable subsystem on the AS/400. Meanwhile, back to my green screen programming... RalphComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
"The only integration to the AS/400 will be with ODBC." -------------------------------------------- Ralph & others - My ODBC experience is very limited. We have a mufti-vendor shipping PC system from Pitney Bowes that integrates with our AS/400 very nicely. Pitney Bowes did the PC ODBC side integration coding. What if any problems would you envision with using the same approach to a front end Microsoft based web site integrated with our AS/400? In other words, what's wrong with ODBC integration?Comment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
There are a couple of problems with ODBC. One is that it is slow. The alternative is to use OLE/ADO which is much faster and gives you record level access, but this method requires more programming knowledge. The other problem you may not ever encounter. If your AS/400 file has a name with an embedded dot (e.g. H.CUSMAS) You will not be able to access this file with ODBC. Your ODBC compliant program will assume that the file's name is "H" and you are looking for a specific field called "CUSMAS". The result will be a Dataset not found error. DaveComment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
Company fined $18,000 for ads - by Lee Copeland Gladwin A Chicago man accused of spray-painting Linux graffiti ads on Chicago sidewalks for IBM was ordered to perform 30 days of community service in recompense for criminal property damage resulting from his role in an ad campaign that went awry. The ads' spray-painted "peace, love and Linux" symbols were part of a national push by the company to support the open-source Linux operating system. The city made IBM pay more that $18,000 in fines to remove 105 sets of the graffiti -- a blue peace sign, heart and smiling penguin -- from Chicago sidewalks. Blue is the company's trademark color, and the penguin is the Linux mascot. The fee the company paid included the cost of cleanup plus a $50 fine for each sidewalk defacing, said Ray Padvoiskis, a spokesman for Chicago's Streets and Sanitation Department. ---------------------------------------------- No! I didn't make this up. It's an article in this week's Computerworld issue dated May 21, 2001 copied directly from page 6. Is this the conservative IBM that we used to know? Is this a clever ad campaign or what?Comment
-
IBM Graffiti Artist Ordered to Perform Community Service
No PC person is going to slow down their web page serving to retrieve data from the AS/400 with ODBC. If you don't believe that you'll find out soon enough. You'll end up with copying files to NT like everybody else so they can suck data out of SQL Server. Everybody will say so what, it's not real time but it's good enough. This si just because you're dealing with PC wienies, not because of any intelligent architectural design deecisions. Sockets programming can be done to any other computer, of course, including the AS/400, from a front end computer, including socket messaging wrappers such as MQSeries. Again, most likely you'll get a spec to copy data to NT and then butt out. RalphComment
Comment