Re: Merlin

Excuse my jumping in here, my friend "x y", but I feel your posting is completely wrong about IBM's motivations and actions.
Let me note that I am a licensed (non-)user of RDi working in Code for i.
But IBM has not abandoned RDi, nor its users, and furthermore, Liam of Code for i has made it clear that some features of RDi will never appear in VSCode.
I anticipate a long twilight era of RDi until the last columnar RPG program has been converted to RPG Free and the last display file application has gone dark!

________________________________
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of x y <xy6581@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2025 00:16
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Merlin

Like every other publicly-traded company in America, IBM is a slave to
quarterly results and chained to year-end results. I'd guess people on the
RDi product side of the house have an aspirational plan (where funding is
no object) and a practical plan (which reflects funding realities); they
strive to get the practical plan funded. But quarter-to-quarter turmoil
can spell the end of any initiative and only a few IBM'ers know about the
Great Stuff on the drawing board for us but only to have it cancelled
faster than a USAID contract.

Outsourcing RDi maintenance to Forta is interesting. We can dream the
IBM'ers formerly supporting RDi are working on Great Stuff (not yet
cancelled...). Or, perhaps Fortra's team members with no product baggage
will put a new spin on the app and make it more VS Code-like. We don't
know if IBM pursued Forta or vice versa--maybe Fortra really wanted to take
over RDi (I'm betting IBM will sell RDi to Fortra in the next year or so).
Forta now has the ability to guide the direction of RDi and that will make
it easier to sell their RDi add-on's. A much bleaker read on the situation
is teminating a contract with a vendor is usually less painful and less
expensive than rehoming, buying out, or laying off employees.

But IBM "c"orporate's message is clear: RDi is not important. I'm using
the lower-case "c" because I doubt such a decision gets the attention of
anybody in Armonk (which only cares about mainframe hardware and
services--they couldn't care less about software). I empathize with the
IBM'ers who worked hard to get RDi where it is today: far, far better than
WDSCI!

But business is business: there's a spreadsheet with red and blue lines on
some Mac somewhere in some IBMer's office. When the red line crosses the
blue line, the lawyers get called in and they'll kill the i, an
ahead-of-its-time, extraordinarily imaginative product that broke the rules
on TCO, helped customers prosper, and gave many on this list a good living
(and deep personal satisfaction). It will be a slow and agonizing death:
the System/32 was announced a few months after I joined IBM and I've spend
2/3's of my life--50+ years--committed to it. I think of HAL-9000 as David
Bowman is pulling out modules..."Daisy, Daisy,..."

Before a cliff slides into the ocean, a few rocks and trees shake loose...




Jack Woehr
Independent Consulting Programmer

303-847-8442

jack.woehr@xxxxxxxxxxx

www.procern.com

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