On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 3:20 PM Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I can't figure out what the business value IBM is getting by taking on
the maintenance / support / documentation / distribution burden of
custom IBM i forks of popular OSS projects, versus an alternative of
modifying PASE to simply compile and run them as-is (after configure,
make, make install)?
THIS A thousand times over, and I think gcc and python fills a lot of the
gaps to make the rest of the OSS ecosystem work, or easily portable.
However, some projects do need attention, and internal resources to make
sure they continue to run on the IBM i. They should follow the example of
Microsoft with projects like jquery, the linux kernel, openssl, and openssh.
Microsoft ships jquery with ASP.NET. They send push requests upstream to
the main repository. They've been doing this since 2008[1], back in the bad
old Balmer days. They are the largest contributor to the linux kernel
because they integrate hyper-v support, but they push their changes
upstream. After the heartbeat bug was discovered, Microsoft forked openssl
on github to transparently contribute to it. And finally, thanks I'm sure
to Satya telling the corporate lawyers to not be so damn paranoid,
Microsoft is going to port openssh to windows properly, ship it with the
OS, but contribute back to the main repisitory (and they gave the project a
bunch of money too). Because of this, when they lose interest and budgets
in these OSS projects, the projects continue to work well with windows.
IBM seems to do something similar with Zend. However, ZendDB is stuck on
MySQL 5.1.x. Why don't they setup some LPARS for all the current OSes with
CI software and help the php and mysql devs do continuous integration so
small bugs get caught right away? Make that available to other open source
projects. Make it easier for OSS maintainers who don't personally care
about the i, but know some of their users do to know if their software
stops compiling on PASE.
Justin
1.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/jQueryToShipWithASPNETMVCAndVisualStudio.aspx
midrange.com
