Showcase for open & free software (Was: Busy day for announcements)

To me, the way one company alone decides what happens with a hardware or software product, as demonstrated in this discussion. Tech companies try to lock the customer handcuffed to whatever the maestro has. From what I saw from a distance, Oracle is an extreme example of lock-in: it looks like their software is made to resist out-migration.

Long story short, in my opinion, if the world as we know it lasts that long, copyright law and patent law is eventually going to go the way of the dodo bird. Might happen slow for awhile, then all at once.

Open and free software at least is already on the way. It's gotten stalled, because momentum, and because of my point. It becomes complicated and even costly for a business to migrate systems.

IBM i shops already are adopting open source. Apache, multi-layer communications protocol, Linux here, Linux there.

Even patents. A Kaypro customer at one company that made parts for copiers early in the PC era told me that every time they innovated some new thing, that a Japanese company would change some little thing and they would get a brand new patent. A CFO at one company I worked at in Cuba, said a mechanic for the farm collective he worked for asked him to pick up a Ford (1954 I think) truck manual, on his trip to Havana, that the mechanic said he needed to fix a Soviet-made truck, because it's exactly the same truck. Patents sham-ments.

-aec

On 07/09/2025 10:24 AM EDT Rob Berendt <robertowenberendt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


If one is currently in such a situation, where they are just treading water
until a conversion is done, then their existing permanent license will be
sufficient. Granted, in the future this may be more difficult. It will
take more planning on the part of the project manager.

But the days of continuing to run on that Windows 3.1 box, or that IBM i
7.1 release, are behind us now. The security risks are too high.

Those of us anxious to get fully on to IBM i 7.6, but vendors are fighting
tooth and nail against putting some of that maintenance money into hardware
or software upgrades, are getting upset.

Energy prices? I would think that the newer models would consume less
energy.

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