David, At the most recent zLinux Council held on December 13th the issue was brought up about supporting these software items on some basis other than vendor distribution. One suggestion was to use the LSB as a standard and supporting the major middleware components on this. IBM seemed receptive especially when mulitple customers chimed in agreement with the suggestion.
I suspect more will be heard, especially if the customers (not the vendors) push the point. This of course started a conversation about LSB on the z/Linux platform and where it stands, but that has already been discussed on the list. Phil David Boyes wrote:
I promised an update on the discussions with IBM's software group wrt to getting their middleware "officially" OKed for use on Debian for 390. At this point, the discussions have not moved very far. After several meetings, the IBM position is that they do not see a business case for supporting the major IBM middleware (WAS, DB/2, etc) on any distributions other than Red Hat or SuSE. There are several technical obstacles in the way, starting with that they indicated that they have set a prerequisite of a completely RPM-based distribution for considering official support. When presented with the capability to handle RPM-based packages with Debian, they indicated that while technically possible it did not meet their requirements. When pressed for a list of technical requirements, the discussion halted at the "if it's not based on RPM, it's not really worth discussing any further" point. In all fairness to IBM, I can see their point -- software testing is expensive and time-consuming -- but it is somewhat disappointing to encounter this as CA, BEA, and Oracle have all been considerably more flexible and cooperative. We'll continue discussing it after the holidays, but I don't see a lot of motion happening at this point, even given the substantial advantage that a lower cost entry point would provide them. I'd be interested in talking to anyone who has turned down a Linux/390-based solution using the IBM middleware products due to implementation costs -- it would greatly help in discussing the business case with IBM to address the entry cost issue. No names will be named (unless you give permission) but other voices are always appreciated...8-) On the positive side, it appears that the most recent try-n-buy and complete packages for WAS, etc continue to install and work without problems using alien...8-) More as it develops. -- db David Boyes Sine Nomine Associates
