Bruce Black writes: >I am told that you can sign a contract to provide 1.4 service after the >EOS date, but the price may be steep
There is an extra cost for extended support. I have no idea what IBM charges for z/OS extended support, but one thing I can say for sure is that it never gets cheaper as each year passes. That makes sense when you think about it. The first year there may be some other customers buying the same thing, and the code isn't too far distant from current coding efforts, so the programmers in the labs can serve extended support customers without too much extra burden (and with a sufficient funding base from a pool of customers). But as each year passes there are fewer and fewer customers interested in paying extended support, and so, over time, you might end up funding a group of service people (and service infrastructure, such as maintaining z/OS 1.4 LPARs on a separate and aging piece of hardware) all on your own since you're the only one left. And there's the concept of "opportunity cost": if the programmers are fixing something for you in z/OS 1.4 that's time they're not working on z/OS 1.12 -- and their work on z/OS 1.12 is very valuable indeed. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
