Re: Fooling around with VRPG

From: Dave Shaw

As another ancient history buff, I've always considered CPF to be OS/400
Version 0. Think of it as an eight-year beta test. ;)

As I see it, the biggest problem with EGL on the System i is going to be
that it's an extra cost item not included with the tools that most of us
get with the machine. Just my opinion, of course.

I agree, Dave. At DevCon last week, I stood up and said to Mike Smith that
IBM would best be served by including one seat in with the 5722WDS tool set.
Others opined that perhaps a one- or two-year trial period, something akin
to the Zend offering, might be a good idea (from what I understand, both
Zend Core and Studio are free for three years, and then you have to pay
software maintenance, although I don't know the particulars -- maybe the PHP
advocates can tell us the pricing model).

In any event, they will indeed have to get the tool in the hands of the
users in order to make it palatable. On the other hand, IBM is moving
towards a component-based licensing model (Mike called it "granularization",
while we've already heard of it as "unbundling"). Expect to pay extra if
you want, for example, the legacy development environments (S/36 and S/38).
I suspect there will be further division of the development tools.

As they move to this model, though, they had better be willing to provide
some relatively long trial periods. 90 days doesn't cut it in the midrange
market. We often need a year to get a pilot project to work in our copious
free time, and then another year to get management approval. It is a little
unreasonable to expect a System i shop to get management approval for a
relatively big-ticket item in 90 days.

Joe