The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main as well.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (McKown, John) writes: > Historically, software was copyrighted or "trade secret". But some court > case in the US really messed that up (don't remember the case name). > Since then, software patents have been pretty much a "free ride". Only > recently have the courts started getting after frivolous software > patents. Imagine, if you will, what would have happened if software > patents had been around in the MVT days. The only scheduling package > would likely be CA-7. The only tape management package would be CA-1. > And, if properly written, the patent for those would be so broad as to > have exclude similar functionality on non-MVT/MVS systems! In the 60s, as undergraudate I had done a lot of dynamic, adaptive scheduling for cp67. A lot of this was dropped in the (simplification) morph from cp67 to vm370. I continued to do 360/370 (cp67 & vm370) stuff during the future system era ... recent discussion of the period related to unbundling: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#1 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008m.html#2 after future system effort was killed ... misc. past post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys there was a mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipeline (both software & hardware) ... and this was somewhat behind motivation to (re)releasing the stuff as "resource manager". Also, the distraction during the future system period is claimed to have significantly contributed to clone processors gaining market foothold. The original 23jun69 unbundling (response to various litigaction) managed to make the case that kernel software should still be free. However, the appearance of clone processors appeared to motivate change in policy and start to also charge for kernel software ... and my "resource manager" got selected to be guinea pig for kernel software charging. I also got told by people from corporate hdqtrs that my resource manager wasn't sophisticated enough ... that all the other resource managers in that era had lots of (manual) "tuning knobs" ... and my resource manager was deficient in the number of such "tuning knobs". It fell on deaf ears that the resource manager implemented its own dynamic adaptive scheduling ... and therefor didn't require all those manual tuning knobs ... and so I had to retrofit (at least the appearance) of some number of manual tuning knobs to get it by the corporate hdqtrs experts. Nearly a decade later (and nearly two decades after I had done the original work as an undergraduate for cp67), some corporate lawyers contacted me for examples of my original work. It supposedly represented "prior art" in some (scheduling) patent litigation that was going on at the time. -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar70 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
