RE: Greenstreak+

The interactive card is not a hardware card in the normal sense.  It doesn't
really *do* anything except establish that you've spent a lot of money.  IBM
treats the interactive card as some sort of symbol permanently linking the
machine you purchased to a specific level of OS usage licensing, thus
enabling IBM to report software licensing revenue as hardware revenue.

If Interactive Feature justified hardware it might be implemented like
memory, and it might be swapped from machine to machine or sold, as you
described.  Some portion of the hardware investment might be preserved or
re-deployed.  If Interactive Feature were implemented more ethically, as a
true software license, you could relicense at lower levels as you migrated
your applications to non-5250 architecture.  What we have instead is the
worst of both worlds.

-Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: Leif Svalgaard [mailto:leif@leif.org]
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 11:22 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Greenstreak+


From: Al Barsa <barsa@barsaconsulting.com>
> No sweat.  Now you can go and convince IBM to do that.
> Thanks Al, that was helpful. Now, can I "downgrade" my interactive
> card and get my money back for the difference?

why should that be so hard? I upgrade when I need to, and downgrading
when I need too (I finally got rid of all green screens) should be a normal
business situation.