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I've attended the SHARE conference for the last few years, it's been going on for more than 50. For those not in the know it's a user conference that's focused primarily on IBM System z and its associated ecosystem. Point by point on the checklist in TFA I can say it passes for the most part, there was a bit of a hiccup with one of the keynote speakers last year in San Jose but for the vast majority of the speakers I've heard they've been relevant and useful. If other parts of the computing ecosystem want to see how a user conference should be run I highly recommend they attend SHARE. Great mix of in-depth product demo sessions, hands-on labs and technical sessions that are often delivered by product experts and/or people who have or are involved in development. I can speak mainly for the z/VM and z/OS security content but there's no other conference I'd rather attend each year.

Not to take away from GNU, but it was not the first freely exchanged open source software. In the batch processing days, every IBM branch office had a file cabinet full of shared software and organizations like SHARE did what the name suggests. Share was formed in 1955 and is still going.

It might be a professional organization, but it's still an organization made up of nerds.

Funnily enough, this isn't the first time this happened. The first nerd war was when the X3 committee was trying to standardize on 7-bit ASCII. They chose a number of characters over a tortuous process involving about a dozen countries, managed to get agreement, and promptly found that the IBM Computer Group (also known as SHARE) were going to boycott the standard. This forced the X.3.2 working group to do a humiliating backdown and make changes which included, amongst other things, putting a break in the "|" character.

Sadly, I know this because I was trying to understand Unicode, got a little bit too interested and wrote a blog article on the precursors of that standard. Which I guess makes me a bigger nerd than anyone. But I swear I haven't fought anyone yet!

IBM had the SHARE organisation since 1955.

In other words, the open source philosophy has been part of IBM's DNA since before most of us were born.

Even on the MVS/OS390/zOS operating system, IBM's JES2 (Job Entry Subsystem) has macros called $DOGBERT (Deliver or Get BERT) and $DILBERT (Do It Later BERT).

BERT presentation (PDF)

One of the largest executables is called IGDZILLA.

For those of you who didn't see the job announcements take a look these news articles!


IBM and SHARE Announce a New Community for the Next Generation of Mainframe Experts.

InformationWeek
Wanted: 20,000 IBM Mainframe Experts.


Visit Mainframe and see what they have to say about wonderful world of mainframes.



I submitted these on the 24th of August. Ignored as usual.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I bleed Blue!

Methinks that over-reaches just a little. Apart from the fact that "propaganda" is a poor choice of word - although it may describe ESR's output - open source pioneers were working effectively in principle long before ESR was out of diapers.

Despite ESR's strenuous self-promotion, the fact is that RMS was of course principally responsible for what we know as open source philosophy and its legal framework. ESR is only one of the slightly loopy hangers-on... valuable, but as is usually the case, in inverse proportion to his ego.

And then there is the Second Act, in which he plans to take credit for the inevitable disintegration of M$. Sorry Eric, that's going to take the whole community to achieve, unless you plan to take your arsenal to Redmond...

Well, sort of. Here's the group: Share.

IBM'ers show up at every conference and present. They are easily accesible. I went for the UserBlue AIX specific portions (and got access to network device driver engineers!), but if you go to the non-AIX,non-eServer HACMP stuff its a whole world of applied mainframes.

There is a community out there and IBMers are looking after it.

Absolutley.

Mainframe source code sharing has been around for 50 years or so.

Check out http://www.share.org/

RMS is just a noisy self-publicist with an axe to grind. People have been openly sharing software ever since software existed. He invented nothing!

The AIX 5 cds come with a "Tools for Linux."

I was at the USER BLUE Share conference a year and a half ago (in Washington, DC) with lots of IBM reps who could only say "LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX!" (actually, thats not true. They said "SUSE" as well...)

Also- THEY don't sell you the LINUX, they get you in touch with SUSE who sells you the linux (blah blah blah liability). But the net effect is you running LINUX on a 615. Not bad.

I recall the huge uproar when IBM decided to withdraw access to the source. It was called their "Object Code Only" (OCO) policy and users were outraged. I still have some of the coke can wrappers passed out at a users group meeting making fun simultaneously of OCO and New Coke. (From a Google search, found this which references Feb. 8th, 1983 as the date of the OCO announcement.

There was a very active community within the major IBM users groups such as SHARE, sharing modifications to the systems. The best collection at the time was the CBT Mods Tape which was originally assembled by a Systems Programmer at Connecticut Bank and Trust. I guess it doesn't suprise me that it still exists (Thanks Google!) as it was an invaluable tool back when I was still involved with mainframes.

A few smart guys will realize that anywhere there's a shortage there's money to be made. I am a mainframe 'techie' (systems programmer) and when I retire from the public payroll I should be able to do consulting for ten years or so at somewhat lucrative rates. As for .NET and some of the other 'remote computing' objectives - that's reinventing the old tube-and-mainframe model, just with prettier UIs. And on the third hand (hey, if we can count from 0 to 15 we can have three hands), the current levels of z/OS are Unix-branded, with all POSIX APIs, run HTTP servers, and do pretty much everything any other server can do (including SMB support so we can pretend to be Windows file and print servers just like Linux). I can stand to get more acquainted with "your" technologies like HTTP and Java to put them to use on my z/OS box. And I'm willing to SHARE the knowledge necessary for those of you that want to upgrade the skills necessary to take advantage of the looming skills shortage

That Ace's Hardware link everybody connects to is a good overview of the IBM architecture and components, but frankly there are plenty of other machines that to my mind are mainframes as well.

Here is a definition that is as good as any, just keep in mind that there are plenty of other mainframes that do not have the IBM label on it.

Since everyone around here loves TCO arguments, here is the mainframe bid for cost-effective computing.

A general mainframe nerd site, with great links and how-tos.

Another good link site.

The dino web ring, a master compendium of 390-related sites.

Official IBMese for mainframes, with more sales power then you can shake an MS manager at.

The granddaddy of all user groups, SHARE kicks butt, defines system requirements to IBM, opposes UCITA, and changes your world more then any 5 computer gatherings you can mention. The members of this organization RUN your bank, credit card, hospital, government and corporate systems. Join the club.

And finally, you can run a mainframe on Linux or a Mac. Warning, IBM has very strict rules about their OS licensing, you are going into uncharted territory if you do ANYTHING remotely work-related with this. But you CAN run a mainframe emulator.

Mainframes implement some of the most proven security mechanisms in the industry, and have rightfully gained a reputation for providing exceptionally secure environments. Still, even though most high-profile security breaches seem to occur on Windows or UNIX systems, mainframes can be hacked as well if all the "back doors" aren't secured. A two-part session at this summer's SHARE conference reviewed procedures for protecting IBM S/390 mainframes from break-ins. Here are links to the .PDF files of the presentations used for Part 1 and Part 2 of the session.

Mainframes implement some of the most proven security mechanisms in the industry, and have rightfully gained a reputation for providing exceptionally secure environments. Still, even though most high-profile security breaches seem to occur on Windows or UNIX systems, mainframes can be hacked as well if all the "back doors" aren't secured. A two-part session at this summer's SHARE conference reviewed procedures for protecting IBM S/390 mainframes from break-ins. Here are links to the .PDF files of the presentations used for Part 1 and Part 2 of the session.

Mainframes implement some of the most proven security mechanisms in the industry, and have rightfully gained a reputation for providing exceptionally secure environments. Still, even though most high-profile security breaches seem to occur on Windows or UNIX systems, mainframes can be hacked as well if all the "back doors" aren't secured. A two-part session at this summer's SHARE conference reviewed procedures for protecting IBM S/390 mainframes from break-ins. Here are links to the .PDF files of the presentations used for Part 1 and Part 2 of the session.