On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:27:56 -0600, Ed Gould <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In order to read source you must understand the language teaching >people COBOL does not qualify them to read a source level OS (unless >its written in COBOL ((thank heaven for that)). ahhh of course there >is JAVA that will get you laughed right out of the US. I just see >*NO* reasonable amount of people being available to take over LINUX >support in the say 20 year time frame. Oh wait we will start >tomorrow.... give me a break IBM has been shutting down education >support for the last say 18 years (maybe before) and now they are >magically going to come up with 20,000 (guess) people to support >LINUX within 20 years? Maybe in INDIA (or China) not in most other >parts of the world. I won't go into the issues of the US government >running their super TS applications on code that was written in a >foreign country. That leaves the US government having to write and >design their own OS , boy are we in trouble. > >Ed Ed: <flame> You are full of it. Linux is written in C, not COBOL or Assembler. Also, there is not a different version of Linux for mainframes, the vast majority of the code is the same on all platforms. What is difference is memory management and of course I/O. This is done mostly through IFDEF statements in the Linux kernel C code. And the System z "changes" are integrated into the mainstream Linux code, not something kept separate by IBM. Also, Linux is the NUMBER TWO operating system in the world now in terms of units (more than all other UNIX variants combined). It is the fastest growing operating system and will continue to grow. There have been some other comments in this thread about the entertainment system on A380s (and other planes) running on Linux. Well you should be aware that ALL the systems on the international space station are running on Linux. I could respond to your paranoia about code written in a 'foreign country', but do you really think anyone develops software exclusively in the US any more? IBM, Microsoft, et all have development labs all over the world. The internet has erased the boundaries for software development (and a lot more) and it will continue to do so. Linux will be around long after you are dust! </flame> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
