* John Paul Adrian Glaubitz: > But I think the list on the page archive criteria is a bit dishonest as > well when it asks "Are machines available to buy for the general public?" > while I don't think an IBM Z mainframe is available to buy for the general > public.
At last for upstream, the difference is that (I assume, I have no direct evidence) IBM uses revenue from their Z business to fund upstream development, and they do more than the required minimum to keep the port working. In that sense, the existence of the Z port is probably not a burden on upstream as a whole (more likely the opposite—but I haven't run any numbers, and those would likely be hard to come by). A contribution of the cc0 switchover to GCC could help upstream if it removes the last remaining cc0 port and thus enables some generic infrastructure cleanup. The latter would obviously benefit upstream as a whole. But it's still a one-time thing. It does not move the port towards a more symbiotic upstream relationship. The downstream perspective might be quite different, but we are talking about funding upstream work.