Re: COMMON attempting to add AIX to the mix...

Hi Folks,

> It would appear that COMMON now wants to be your AIX users group as well as
> the traditional iSeries(or whatever).
>
> What do you guys think of this move?

I think there's a ton of good that can come from this. COMMON has
promised not to cut back at all on IBM i education and offerings -- they
are looking at this as expansion, not replacement. That's a good thing,
because it (potentially) could make COMMON stronger.

After all, from a hardware perspective we do share the same hardware
that the AIX folks use. There are a bunch of sessions that could
(perhaps with small tweaks) apply to either group purely for that
reason. Why NOT encourage additional membership into COMMON?

From the software point of view, I wouldn't view this purely as having
both AIX software and IBM i software. Rather, it gives businesses some
choice.

For example, there's really no good business-oriented programming
language on AIX. Why not show AIX users the advantages of RPG? Or of
the integrated database? Or of some of the fine software packages shown
in the expo? To run IBM i and take advantage of it's awesome
business-oriented capabilities, an AIX shop only has to run an IBM i
partition on their existing Power hardware. That's a good thing for the
IBM i community -- we can bring in new customers/users.

It also offers the same sort of features in the other direction, of
course... there may be advantages to having an AIX partition.
Especially when you look at the volume of open source packages that run
on AIX but not on IBM i.

It seems to me that this has the potential to breathe new life into our
platform. I don't understand the negativity...

There are certainly challenges, though. One big one is the fact that
AIX people don't really think of themselves as "AIX people". Not in the
way that we think of ourselves as "IBM i people". They don't really
consider themselves part of an "AIX community". Instead, they consider
themselves Unix people, and part of a Unix community... that might make
it hard to convince them to come to an "AIX/IBM i conference". They
might be more interested in going to a more general Unix conference...
as David points out, there's a lot of competition there.

So, I guess we'll see what happens. But I think it's a great idea.
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