Interesting. Some questions come to mind. Would it have to have current software to attract the open source community?
What sort of support would be available from IBM and from volunteers? Would IBM partially subsidize it if you could show that it would expand the market? How would you make it known to the open source community? Would it be involved with the Academic community and would it coordinate with IBM academic programs? Would it include a repository or would it rely on, e.g., Bitbucket, GitLab, Phabricator, SourceForge? What sort of infrastructure would it need? Listserv? Online courses? Would user assistance be free, chargeable or multi-tiered, with simple questions and bug reporting being free? I'm sure that there are lot's of issues that I've overlooked, but if this goes anywhere I expect that others will think of them. I hope that it actually takes off. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Grant Taylor [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, July 3, 2020 12:12 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Mainframe co-op Let's turn the mainframe access discussion on it's head. What would it take for a group of undetermined number of people to form a co-op, probably as a legal business entity, to acquire legal, completely above board, access to a mainframe (CPC / LPAR / VM) that could run z/VM with multiple z/OS guests there in? The desire is to be able to provide lower cost access to VMs similar to traditional VPSs for hobbyists and students. All legal. All licensed. All completely above board. Depending on equipment configuration, all with proper service contracts. I wonder just how high, or possibly low, the bar would be. Is it even remotely something a group of 5 / 10 / 25 / ?? hobbyists could get together and pool their resources and do? I know multiple people that have CPCs. But they don't currently have DASD. I think at least one of them has a line on legal licenses for z/OS for his CPC. What would it take for one of these people to legally provide other hobbyists / students access to their systems? -- Grant. . . . unix || die ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
