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Thanks for the history lesson Mark. I openly admit that I’m new to the rapidly evolving Open Source movement - primarily because as an independent service provider, I don’t own the IP to give away; and I like to think that I still freely gave away knowledge, helpful hints, etc. whenever I could. I’ve learned that the OSS movement has dramatically changed and contributions are NOT all about giving away source code, based on the old model.
I know you are a tremendous asset to the IBM i community and have freely helped so many (myself included) over the years - related to “old school” Open Source (when it WAS all about giving away source code) and many other, more focused subjects. I fully expect that you will continue to share with the general IBM i community and the specific IBM i OSS community. That’s the kind of collaboration that defines the "modernized" Open Source movement I see in 2016. As you (and others) point out, the history is long and has been a rocky road for many; and still innovative solutions have been developed, deployed, iterated, improved, redeployed, etc.
In my opinion, the real issue is not the history (the past is gone, highly unlikely to return - although we all see the patterns that tend to repeat themselves), the real issue is what we can do today. You and others continue to educate me about how all this *nix stuff has been there ‘ orever’ and that the highly motivated, extremely talented, very focused, systems programmers have been able to make magic happen with those tools on the IBM Midrange for decades. I always ask, what about the business programmers? Does everyone have to learn all that 'hard stuff' in order to get a simple result for their businesses? It amazes me how much we’ve lost our way. As developers who work for businesses (I know that doesn’t represent the entire community, but that’s most of us), our primary goal must be to deliver business value. The computer scientists and systems programmers are very necessary in our world, we wouldn’t have this wonderful platform that is the IBM midrange without them; yet at the end of the day, our role as developers who work for businesses is to do everything we can to increase income (or reduce expenses) for that business. I’m probably getting off-topic, so I’ll step off my soapbox a bit.
Again, in my opinion, I believe what the IBM team is delivering to us now in 5733OPS is definitely not a joke. It may have less immediate value to you experienced systems programmers who have lived and breathed it for decades. It has exceptional immediate value to experienced business developers who simply want to more quickly deliver business value. It’s still not a perfect world - never will be; yet these doors that IBM are opening for us give our platform a real chance for competitiveness and interoperability with the rest of the computing world - and to me, that is a beautiful thing to see!
So I’ve beaten around the bush for a while, I’ll get to the point. I’ll ask you a similar question I asked in another forum in response to another challenge to this blog post. You demand that the IBM i community wakes up; but your post is full of inflammatory statements that appear to deflect attention away from a blog post that is an effort to help the community join together to collaborate, innovate and educate each other about the new and improved system capabilities.
What’s up with that?
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