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El Reg reports
Attachmate, the software shop that headhunted Novell and SUSE Linux, is itself being bought out by Micro Focus International.
The mainframe and COBOL specialist is acquiring Attachmate Group from its parent company Wizard in a deal calculated at $2.3bn before costs.
[...]
Attachmate gives MicroFocus access to SUSE and Novell, business units bought by the company in 2010 for $2.2bn. Novell owned SUSE Linux, which it had bought in 2003 for $210m. Under Attachmate, the two were broken apart.
putting 882 patents in its Linux portfolio up for sale to a consortium backed by Microsoft.
SUSE is chief steward of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server while Novell has been re-shaped to sell end-point management and collaboration software.
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Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is?
A: One per person.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:49PM
" Most of this stuff was obviated by falling mainframe prices - no one really cared about doing development offline any longer, after a point."
HERCULES to the rescue! Pizza almost certainly knows the software I'm talking about, others can google.
Sure its illegal to run licensed software products on an unlicensed hardware emulator, but with little more than a wink and a nod everyone does it anyway.
Speaking as a guy who suffered thru MF cobol classes around the turn of the century and worked at a mainframe shop in the early 90s there is no avoiding the fact that java is the new cobol. Hyper verbose, NIH to the max, complicated business logic, nobody but fortune 50 companies wants it that way. Everyone else sees it as a liability. Java is like SAP in that way.
I screwed around a lot with hercules and mvs360 and the turnkey system maybe a decade ago. If it was good enough to run a multinational megacorp in 1965, I'm going to fool around with it in 2005 and see what I can learn from retrocomputing and expanding my brain into new (new to me) architectures and thought patterns. Strange stuff.
I wish in 2014 linux had good free batch queuing as good as we had in the 60s with MVS. Someone will likely implement that someday. Hopefully not into systemd. Torque/PBS/Maui just aren't quite up to that level. Close, though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday September 17 2014, @04:17PM
Hercules has always been a raw nerve for me. If there's a "skills shortage" and qualified mainframe programmers and systems programmers are in short supply, why wouldn't IBM release an educational version of its turnkey MVS system (what do they call it? ADCD?) for people to use with Hercules? I mean, it's not like I could do real data processing on a laptop. But I could learn how to use JCL to compile COBOL programs. You'd have a whole generation of college students getting into mainframes for the first time. What better way to learn systems programming that setting up Hercules? They'd have a whole generation getting excited about the mainframe for the first time, and ease their "skills shortage".
Oh, no. What did I just type? Use JCL to compile COBOL programs?
There's a magic potion that makes you forget about that stuff.
Bleach.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:10PM
Well the turnkey is 3rd party uncopyrighted all the way. Yeah the ADCD or whatever its call is a full system from ibm but it's all locked down illegal although in theory you can run it. One minor problem is if you think the MVS turnkey is mysterious and huge and complicated, modern zos is like 1000x bigger so its almost hopeless.
This might be some of their fear, you can release it, but nobody being able to figure it out other than the experts might be more bad press than good. Unlike unix / bsd / linux I don't believe you can self teach on MVS, but thats just my personal belief.
I could figure out how to use fortran on the pdp8 all myself with the manuals, but I had to get help to run cobol on mvs.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:36PM
The MVS 3.8 turnkey system is so obsolete that if you learned it you wouldn't learn anything you could use on modern z/OS. I know 3.8 doesn't have ISPF (the full-screen stuff - have fun using TSO commands without it), and I can't remember if it has JES2 or the older HASP. Even recently, z/OS is getting so heavily dependent on OMVS (the POSIX subsystem) that you basically have to know UNIX, too. But I said goodbye to all that and never looked back, especially after the shock treatments. It is getting hopeless. No one can grasp it all any longer, so IBM is releasing pre-built systems. (That's one reason I wouldn't get into mainframes if I was young - there's just less work to do these days, causing high unemployment, and you're competing with people who have decades of experience. Will be a long time before that works its way out of the pipeline.)
One thing that UNIX/Linux/FreeBSD/etc can't really teach you is file allocation. On MVS/zOS you have to know ahead of time how big your file will be, and what record format it will use. DEC VMS had a little of that, but almost all modern operating systems have abandoned this concept. Rightfully so. (You can, of course, code your own file formats that use fixed-length records. But you have to code your own utilities, too.) But you haven't used a real operating system until you've had to calculate blocking sizes, record lengths, extents, and so on. That stuff is a whole different world.
And the most important thing ... wait, what's that sound? Oh, a drone just landed. With my same-day delivery package! Let me open it... yes! A 64-ounce bottle of bleach!
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)