"harder and harder to get people that known and understand them" This is not surprising. IBM could fix this overnight if it wanted to. How? By providing no-cos

"harder and harder to get people that known and understand them" This is not surprising. IBM could fix this overnight if it wanted to. How? By providing no-cost educational licenses for its mainframe software for use on Hercules. Why don't they do this? I believe that there are 2 reasons why: (1) they're terrified of people running their production mainframe workloads on a non-mainframe, and (2) I believe that some of IBM's existing mainframe customers keep pressure on IBM to prevent them from opening up the 'mainframe secrets to the world'. The second point is the belief in security through obscurity. I don't have any evidence to back up this belief, it's just my theory. The other thing that IBM could do is provide low-cost (or even no-cost) options to real mainframe environment over the internet. I know that they have some of this, but it's too restrictive. I'm talking about opening it up like AWS did with free for 1 year. But that's expensive? It wasn't free for AWS to do it, and it wouldn't be free for IBM to do it. However, it would eliminate the biggest barrier to entry for new talent. Getting back to my theory of security through obscurity, I believe that this is also in play with AIX and iSeries (AS/400). A number of years back, I bought a used RS/6000 workstation on eBay for the purpose of learning and I contacted IBM to get a licensed copy of AIX 4.3. It was as if I were speaking in tongues trying to get through to them. IBM: "Sir, what's your IBM customer number?" Me: "Umm, I don't have one. I'm just an individual who bought a used RS/6000 on eBay." IBM: "We can't sell you an AIX license without a customer number." Me: "Ok, well give me one." IBM: "What's the name of the company?" Me: "There is no company. It's just me as an individual who wants to learn about the technology." IBM: "We have to have a company name." Me: "Put my name as the company name." ... ... ... Eventually, get assigned an IBM customer number and did finally get AIX CD-ROMs from IBM. I can only imagine that it would be 10x worse to do something similar with their iSeries (AS/400). When you see this over and over, I'm left with the conclusion that IBM doesn't want individuals getting their hands on their hardware or their software.