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

Hahaha! The i is the golden-est of the golden handcuffs. Larry Ellison is
jealous: we have proprietary software, AND proprietary hardware, AND no
commitment from IBM on a sunset date.

A $200 million customer would need $20 million and five years to completely
deplatform from my app--and I think I'm not conservative enough. Many
businesses don't have the financial resources, management expertise, and
management depth to execute such a transition. Managing a vendor's
technology jump can be murderous--think of what it took S/34 and S/36 users
to figure out the System/38 and AS/400. New vendor, new technology,
probably new staff? It's a recipe for disaster. The smart folks are
stockpiling hardware now!

Good products--actually, smart vendors--don't need to erect exit barriers.
Good products engrain themselves into an organization's operations and
loyal users can be a very strong glue. But with the invasion of the
financial engineering snake known as "private equity", expect to see
breathtaking increases on maintenance fees and reduced cross-vendor
integration options--anything to boost revenue.

On Thu, Jul 10, 2025 at 2:37 PM Infodorado InfoDorado via MIDRANGE-L <
midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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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