I agree with where you are coming from Pete, but I can see IBM's side of it
to (though I think their approach needs to be modified). If IBM wanted to
stop living in Microsoft's shadow they should stop trying to catch up and
instead lead the way.
From the sounds of it you can't install the product, period, without first
purchasing. That is probably the dumbest idea for trying to sell software
that I have heard of. How are you going to hook people if they don't even
know what they are missing? IBM needs to head on over the Sam's Club and
see how they get people to buy new product - they let you eat samples!!
Sure they eventually ask me to leave after 5 samples, but at that time I
know weather or not I like the product (and I can skip lunch that day ;-).
I get the feeling we are in for a repeat of the licensing scenario we had
for i5OS user profiles. They start out with something fairly awkward and
based on community response change it to meet needs.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 4:55 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: 5733QU2 - No Developer Discount
Bummer.
I am going to echo several of the sentiments here and say that this further
constrains us "green screen" folks from moving into the web world. I don't
mind being charged for something but it seems like the latest moves by IBM
just make things more expensive and difficult, which is curious if the goal
is to motivate developers to move to the web.
Query/400 is nearly ubiquitous in the System i world and even back in the
day it wasn't an expensive item, relative to other tools. And, it didn't
take a "designer" tool and a "runtime" tool to get the job done.
Why is it that when it comes to tools, web tools, IBM is just now delivering
what is needed. Even then it is at an expense or is packaged in such a way
that it is out of reach of developers and then costly to deploy to
customers. I would understand it if this was 1997 and we had to pay dearly
to play in an emerging "web world". But this is the 21st century and IBM
should be providing all of these tools in a "base"
system. An "off the rack" model. Instead, web development tools are
treated like some kind of extra add on that only the "esoteric"
developer would be interested in (and would pay a premium for at that).
Sigh....
I'll see if I can give it this a try at a customer's site. My hand-me-down
270 isn't on SWMA so I can't order it (I was hoping to get it through SAC).
I might be able to get it for my developer leased 520 (I'll have to check).
Meanwhile, I am pretty comfortable with Jasper Reports (Java) and perhaps I
can write some RPG wrappers that could run the Jasper Reports objects. The
iReport designer makes building the report easy and they look slick. I'll
just need to make sure that the report object is in the classpath and build
a wrapper to run it. The report would have to be saved to the IFS and then
retrieved from there but that might just work.
Another project on the list...
Pete
midrange.com
