I apologize if I'm repeating, but let me say that there are more skills to a "COBOL programmer" than learning COBOL. There is JCL, utilities, data set usage, CICS, DB2, etc, etc.
If IBM or big companies that rely on these skills really wanted to solve them, they probably could. My belief is that they just assume that they can outsource this to developing countries that *will* find a way to provide some minimally trained programmers. After all, programming labor is just a commodity where quality or customer business knowledge doesn't matter ;-) I would suggest that IBM sponsor, or at least support (allow?) efforts to provide a "cloud enabled, provisionable, *legacy* z/OS education platform". Build it on zPDT, but allow it to be provisioned in a cloud so that cloned base image of z/OS could be provisioned for students along with their own volumes for UCAT/data. Start with something *basic* that would allow for COBOL / batch / JCL / TSO / SPF development. Provide web based everything - including 3270 emulation, and tools to import export student data. Then, allow any education provider (traditional/online University, MOOC) to use it - either on their own cloud or through fee-based cloud/VPS providers. The important thing is that it be simple to provision and use. Kirk Wolf http://dovetail.com PS> Maybe even Hercules + MVS3.8 would be good enough for a basic "legacy" learning environment? I'm not current on community efforts there, but what if someone packaged a VM or VirtualBox with a preconfigured Linux image that included Hercules, MVS3.8, a separate web interface for administration, user tools for import/export, 3270 emulation, some docs, etc, etc. Then it could be downloaded or cloud/VPS served and any education platform could just point students to it and then add instructional value on top. AFAIK, no legal SPF is available - so this would be very limited. Also - can you really attract young people to learn a platform where the docs are 30+ year old scanned images? My prediction: at some point IBM will realize that the risks/costs of have a freely available educational z/OS subset aren't as great as the risks/costs of the decreasing demand for z/OS and complete lack of innovations by independent entrepreneurs. But this will probably occur too late; only in hindsight :-( ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
