Hi list,
I speak for myself and not for IBM.
I should be working on CUPS and Samba printing, but this thread has created
an itch I just have to scratch. I'll shed some light on the conspiracy
theory, though you won't find a smoking gun :))
I proposed the redbook "Open Source Software for OS/390 UNIX" in 1999 after
finishing a couple of redbooks which "dabbled" in open source. To my
delight it was funded for the year 2000 and the *next month* Linux hit the
scene. We ran an ITSO residency in February and March with Sandor Barany,
Ralf Schandl and Egon Terwedow working hard on vim, openss*, groff, gnats,
Perl and many others. Jim Tison caught wind of the project and happened to
be on the same floor. He chipped in the autoconf and automake chapters. A
lot of open source for OS/390 was available for the picking on the Web,
especially on the MKS Web site (to MKS' credit, still online at
ftp://ftp.mks.com/pub/s390/gnu/). It was a fun project.
There was a lot of work done, but it was only a 6 week residency. If
you've done software development, you know that six weeks is not a lot of
time - oh and we had to write a book as well as work on the code. The
first book was published in October of 2000 and was moderately successful
as a book. I felt the code was more valuable than the book. Getting legal
approval was a lot of work and it probably would never have happened were
it not for GNU and Linux and IBM's new religion. For a background on this,
see page 4 especially
(http://dir.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_part_one/index.html?pn=4)
of "How Big Blue Fell for Linux" - an excellent article by Andrew Leonard.
I proposed an update to the redbook and code which was funded for 2001. By
now Linux on zSeries had critical mass and was a whole lot more UNIX-like
and fun than z/OS UNIX Systems Services. Regardless, we had a project to
complete. This time the residents were Thorsten Brockmeier, Guillermo
Freige, Stefan Koesling, Kiran Madnani and Fulvio Malfatto all of whom did
a great job. In retrospect, we bit off more than we could chew. We should
have focused more on code quality and less on quantity (OpenSSL and OpenSSH
have problems. The randomness of OpenSSL is not always adequate. SSH works
with version 1 not version 2, sftp and scp do not work I believe.). The
book ran into 2002 and was published in March. Both books had CDs in the
back; a feature that the ITSO no longer supports. One of the complaints of
the first book was that the source and binaries were distributed each as
two large tar files with every package in each. So for the second book we
split out the source packages and binaries at least on the tools and toys
Web site - another chunk of work - especially packaging up tar files for
the binaries of individual packages.
In October of this year, both the redbook and the code were pulled from IBM
Web sites (apparently not as thoroughly as possible :) to be "serviced".
Steve Stiert is the Webmaster of Tools and Toys and the good news is that
the code is going back on Web soon, per his append. I coincidentally just
asked yesterday about the status of the redbook going back on the Web.
There are some deletions to be made that would take the excellent editors
at the ITSO perhaps a couple of hours to complete and turn the crank to
make the book available. So the book should or at least could have been
available by now. The holiday season is also the editors' busiest season
as ITSO project leaders scramble to get their projects completed by the
calendar year and move on to newly funded projects. So there's a queue to
get this two hours of work done. The book might have been able to jump the
queue, however the snag is that the ITSO no longer includes CDs in hard
copies of books. Because of this a lot more deletions have to be made of
references to "the CD included with the hard copy of the book"
(interestingly the astounding number of 60 hard copies of this redbook were
ever sold). Given these factors, I'm guessing the book will be available
on the ITSO Web site early next year.
I now wanted to step back and comment and just noticed David Froberg's
append, so, thanks for that - I'll use it as a springboard:
> 1) I really appreciated the web site and redbook because it helped
> me greatly to get a handle on porting tools to USS.
> 2) Its disappearance forced me to research and experiment more with
> porting to USS since a number of tools at the web site really are very
> valuable.
Thanks, that's good to hear.
> 3) The biggest thing that repeatedly struck me, though, was the
> static nature of the web site's tools. (And this is NOT
> knock against anyone at IBM. As I said in #1, I greatly appreciated
> the site.) I also work with the Linux world and
> and watch frequent notices and then frequent updates for various
> tools (Samba for example is at what? 2.2.7a?). Would it not be nice to
> have some web site and process by which the tools were more current? How
> this
