Speaking as a vendor.
There are several interfaces that I had to invest a *lot* of time to get
working right. And using those interfaces is what makes my products
efficient and market worthy.
If I were to publish some of my interface code, some new guy would have
75% of a product that can compete with my product. In other words, what
I spend a man-year bringing to market, he can bring to market in just 3
man-months because he used my code.
I don't mind market competition, but I do mind competing against my own
code.
And, that is just the business facts.
On the flip side, I do share code that is small or that I acquired from
someone else. As an example, I just made an update to a program 'found
on the internet' that was written by someone who has passed away. This
update was made for a specific vendor and is code that they will offer
to their clients. I insisted that they ship both the unchanged source
code and the new source code (since I had only changed about 20 lines).
Another point:
If you look at my web site and the free programs, you will find several
TCP/IP Client and Server programs in Cobol.
http://dinomasters.com/coolstuff
I help people a lot with this type of programming. But, I remember the
case where someone asked my help on a program that a previous programmer
had written. When he sent me the code, it was one of my samples with
just my name removed and the previous programmer's name added. I even
found my emails with the previous employee helping him understand the
programs. And, he told everybody the code was his (per the guy that I
helped later). That stinks. [The bug was already corrected on my web
site and available for download.]
Tony Thigpen
Farley, Peter x23353 wrote on 11/12/18 1:13 PM:
Not jumping on Ed Jaffe or Peter Relson or any of the other thoughtful and helpful
responders in this email chain, but it still rankles me that there are no good examples
anywhere (not at IBM and not at CBT) for programmers to review that show exactly how to
set up and use "SRB to the other address space and PC-ss back to the requesting
address space" or any similarly sophisticated system-level application coding
technique.
Why is system-level application coding made an obscure mystery to which only IBM and (some) ISV's
have access? Good examples that show how to "do the right thing" would avoid an awful
lot of dangerous experimentation. "Security through obscurity" is, I think all here
would agree. NOT a good thing.
If you don't show programmers how to do it right, you can't really yell at them
for not doing so.
Maybe if the ISV's got together (at SHARE maybe?) they could agree on publishing
stripped-down HOWTO examples based on the work they have already done to "do the
right thing". That way no one ISV is alone in exposing any potentially valuable
intellectual property.
And of course IBM really ought to be publishing good examples too, but I suspect the
answer to that is the usual "what business justification can you show to make it a
profitable exercise to spend valuable and scarce resources doing?".
How about helping your customers not to give themselves serious trouble that
you could help them avoid?
Just my $0.02USD worth.
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Ed Jaffe
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2018 11:35 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: Recommended method for accessing secondary access spaces
On 11/12/2018 7:28 AM, Joseph Reichman wrote:
I can use CSA storage to pass back the data if after I copy it over I
release it
We used to do that back in the pre-ESA/390 days.
That technique carries with it all sorts of hideous timing/cleanup issues that
simply don't exist with the PC-ss technique. Food for thought...
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