Mainframe support

[Johnson David]

On Monday 29 March 2004 12:30 pm, Adam Turoff wrote:

> So while IBM's VM per se may only be interesting to the Fortune 500,
> virtualization is gaining traction, especially at the low end of the
> spectrum.  ISPs for example have been offering accounts on virtual
> machines for a few years now.  I wouldn't be surprised to see shops
> that used to buy vanilla boxes in groups of 4 to soon start buying
> boxes one one by one, adding a few GB of RAM and at least 1 TB of
> disk, and partitioning them on demand.

I don't know if this is the same thing or not, but the John Company 
(www.johncompanies.com) seems to be already doing this with FreeBSD.

> That's one way to look at it.  But how is this different from free
> software running on proprietary hardware (e.g. a PowerBook or an
> iMac)?

It's not just the hardware, it's the fact you have to buy propriety 
software to run the free software. It would be like a NetBSD that 
required Aqua and Carbon to run on the Mac. Imagine an IBM advert 
saying "Free yourselves from software domination with Free Software 
Linux running on our Z-series mainframes! (required proprietary host OS 
sold separately...)"

This was just one problem I saw, and not necessarily the one at the top 
of the list. But considering the antipathy towards proprietary software 
in the Linux community, I thought it strange. Somehow I can't imagine a 
MVS/Debian distribution :-)

David