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Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

Generalizing the question a little in case someone passes through with an answer:

Why should a couple of hackers working out of the proverbial garage building the next unicorn consider IBM as their infrastructure vendor?

What are their offerings? How do those stack up against the defaults of aws/Azure + Linux + Postgres/MySql?

Assume said hackers are broke.

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On the far opposite of the startup post company gobble up side - I've been pleasantly surprised how well our zSeries ran OpenShift k8 images for our inherited mainframes. A simple tune for s390x JDKs, and many of the Java based apps were off to the races. The hardware already was - so the cost of putting it to work ended up being cheaper than using cloud resources. The IO, as one might expect, is very solid. Loving the hardware we had was a less bitter pill than pushing out our own instances.

After noodling out how to make my docker images work on aarch64 and amd64, it was trivial.

They wouldn’t. These are “deep pockets” platforms. Ramen eaters need not apply.

This is the point - IBM doesn't seem willing to help. I'd love to be able to use LinuxONE machines as VM hosts (single thread performance and IO throughput are absolutely ludicrous) but there seems to be no entry-level machine that doesn't imply in a very sizeable investment. And I suspect LinuxONE and POWER10 machines would very cost effective ways for IBM to provide Linux VMs for public cloud environments at better price/performance points that it could be achieved with x86 or ARM.

To me, it's absolutely nuts they don't have entry paths to their crown jewels. What will IBM's competitive advantage if everyone migrates from AIX and IBMi to Linux? While there is no IBMi emulator, there are commercial environments that can compile and run COBOL and PL/1 code made for i on x86 Linux machines.

I think that was the point of the Red Hat acquisition. "See all those Linux boxes you run? Do you want to have someone to yell at when they blow up? It's either us or Canonical.".

There's no way z/OS is going to be free or open-source (if for no other reason than if they open sourced it, you'd still need a mainframe, which means you're going to pay IBM for cloud time), so if hobbyists are going to start with something they'll probably start with Linux. Once they are no longer a hobbyist, IBM will be there to help.

> There's no way z/OS is going to be free or open-source (if for no other reason than if they open sourced it, you'd still need a mainframe, which means you're going to pay IBM for cloud time)

This is probably why IBM mainframe OSes until the 1980s are public domain: You can't run MVS without an IBM mainframe, so why bother even copyrighting the source code? The Hercules people are grateful for that bit of pragmatism.

http://www.hercules-390.org/hercfaq.html

https://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/

https://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/

https://cbttape.org/~jmorrison/mvs38j/index.html

I believe the actual reason old IBM mainframe OSes is that computer programs originally weren't copyrightable. When the law was changed to make them copyrightable, this wasn't retroactive.

MVS 3.8j contained software developed under US Federal contracts, and that is why it is freely available.

> There's no way z/OS is going to be free or open-source

I never said that.

What I said is that there aren't any onboarding routes to z/OS (or AIX, or IBMi). You either already are running one or more z/OS boxes, or you'll just deploy to cloud, CentOS, Kubernetes, OpenShift, on commodity CPUs (x86 and ARM), or any of the other stack that rivals a mainframe in some capabilities (and carefully avoid business requirements only a mainframe can fulfill)

Sure, I'm a bit sad to see tech lost as well. However I gave up hope decades ago that someone at IBM might have read the "Innovators Dilemma." Or considered employing the longterm-thinking kind of executive that would have read it.

Not sure if big-blue ever had that kind of person in abundance to be honest. Was recently reading up on the DEHOMAG thing recently, and well probably not. At least Watson tried to give the Nazi medal back, haha.

Makes you wonder what future the platform has, when the only customers that are willing to afford it are banks and defense.

You wouldn’t. Most customers tolerate IBM, they aren’t investing.

The only exception is in the defense space, there are some things from a segmentation perspective that are cheaper to achieve on mainframes. But that isn’t a startup scenario, and those advantages are eroding as well.

IBM has huge margins on this stuff, so the typical play is use margin on the mainframe to win software and services deals. Startups need fast time to market, so it makes sense to overpay AWS by the drink than to overpay for a feast from IBM.

Softlayer was (is?) a good US-based bare-metal hosting provider before IBM acquired it. A company I worked at in the mobile gaming space in 2012 used them for their US backends. Not sure if they're good value these days.

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