Re: Staying current on releases? (was: Are there any System i sites on the Internet that offer accounts?)

At our last LUG meeting I had, to me at least, an interesting conversation with the programming manager of a widely used application. He wanted to be able to move to a v6r1 system sometime this year, but naturally being able to compile backlevel.
Anyway, he tried to explain to me what he was going to have to go through to be able to support all of their customers (apparently at least one is still on V3). After listening to this bizarre scenario (no dig meant towards him), I asked him why they didn't just tell customers that they wouldn't support any release not supported by IBM. He said they tried that awhile back, but that they had a significant number of clients say that they would dump the package and go somewhere else.
I didn't dig any deeper, just sat stunned (for a sec).
But I did know a company that, about 10 years ago, was still running the business on a System/3 (no typo). Can't say if they still are because that was in another town that I don't get to any more. But the reasoning of the D/P manager then (a member of the LUG) was that the company was strapped and did not have the resources to upgrade to even a used System/34 so they just kept using what they had. I guess there are more companies in that boat than I ever thought about.


* Jerry C. Adams
*IBM System i Programmer/Analyst
B&W Wholesale Distributors, Inc.* *
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615.995.7024
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Lukas Beeler wrote:

On Jan 22, 2008 2:39 PM, Adam Glauser <adamglauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

accounts are on a V5R2 system, but that has worked well enough for me
since I've been using it for writing articles and I don't want to
accidentally use a feature that isn't available to most people. You can

Are there many people that run something below V5R3? V5R3 is currently
the lowest release supported.

Do you really think that the people running unsupported i5/OS versions
are the majority of System i users?

I know a few customers that are not current on their OS, but that has
usually political reasons. And they're very few.