On 7/3/20 11:13 AM, Seymour J Metz wrote:
Interesting. Some questions come to mind.
Discussion is good.
Would it have to have current software to attract the open source
community?
I don't think that bleeding edge is needed in any way shape or form.
My personal interest would be something in the z/OS family. The bottom
end of what is still supported would be a minimum desired version. But
I think anything in z/OS is better than was is readily available now.
What sort of support would be available from IBM and from volunteers?
I would not assume any support from IBM for things like PMRs. Though I
suppose that is a possible option.
I would think that much of the support would come from the community.
Would IBM partially subsidize it if you could show that it would
expand the market?
I have no idea.
I would not count on any such support to get started. As such, any
support from IBM would be icing on the cake.
How would you make it known to the open source community?
I don't know.
I would think that members commenting about it on various social media
channels would be a good start.
It would probably need it's own mailing list and / or discussion channels.
Would it be involved with the Academic community and would it
coordinate with IBM academic programs?
I don't object to such. But I don't want it to be beholden to such either.
Would it include a repository or would it rely on, e.g., Bitbucket,
GitLab, Phabricator, SourceForge?
I think it would behoove the project for it to offer it's own
repositories and similar services; mailing list, chat, etc. The idea
being to avoid external dependency.
That being said, I don't see any reason that members couldn't choose to
use their own external repository, etc.
What sort of infrastructure would it need? Listserv? Online courses?
I see the current desired things:
- repository
- web page
- mailing list(s)
- I really like Mailman's ability to do topic based mailing lists.
Subscribe, pick your topic(s), etc.
- chat would be nice
- irc
- slack
- other
Ironically, I think all of these could be hosted on the mainframe
itself. Possibly Linux on z.
I would like to see options for people to connect their guest VM to the
fledgling HECnet that Moshix is touting. I think these types of
activities allow people to grow and learn in atypical areas.
Want to play with DASD replication? Sure. -- I naively assume that
something could be set up under z/VM to allow a z/OS guest to play with
multiple DASDs to test and learn about a concept.
Want to play with IPL parameters, go ahead.
Want to play with HCD, yep, you can do that too. -- I naively assume
that IOCDS / HCD is still a thing in a z/OS guest VM.
Would user assistance be free, chargeable or multi-tiered, with simple
questions and bug reporting being free?
All very good questions.
I would hope that there is some free best effort much like the existing
community. I would be happy to see some professional / consultation
services available much people can hire a tutor for many different
subjects. I would expect those arrangements to be between the guest VM
subscriber and the ""tutor.
I would want to avoid this overarching co-op from being a profit center.
The purpose is to make things accessible and as affordable as
reasonably possible to do so. I chose "co-op" on purpose. At least
based on my understanding of the term.
I would want to put things in place to prevent people from abusing
services and / or using guest VMs to enable them to make a profit by
hosting line of business applications.
I don't know if this is even possible or not. But perhaps put a
resource quota that only allows the guest VM to be active 20-25 days a
month. You pick when it's convenient for your guest VM to be shut down.
But hopefully that would prevent businesses from abusing it for
production.
This is also where the low MIPS comes into play. Enough for a single
user to do some small things on top of whatever the guest OS needs.
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.
I do too.
I'd love to learn more. I'd love to subscribe to such a system.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
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