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I'm annoyed by how IBM is trying to add z/OS support to open source projects. It makes sense for them of course. But for the projects there's little upside and

by bla3 6y ago

I'm annoyed by how IBM is trying to add z/OS support to open source projects. It makes sense for them of course. But for the projects there's little upside and it forces them to spend reviewer time on a system basically nobody uses. Who wants EBCDIC in 2021 [1]? Or workarounds for yet another proprietary compiler everywhere [2]? Open-source projects might want to think about rejecting patches for working around bugs in closed-source compilers, or patches that port to closed-source OSs that don't have a significant user base. 1: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-June/142300.html https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-June/142300.h... 2: https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/pull/2190 https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/pull/2190

tw04 6y ago
>But for the projects there's little upside and it forces them to spend reviewer time on a system basically nobody uses. If someone waved a magical wand and disappeared every mainframe on the planet right now, every single financial system on the planet would collapse with it. Why would an open source project reject commits for mainframe support? Because you don't personally use one in your business? By that logic we should dump 99% of the drivers in Linux because I personally don't have a need for them. (yes these folks clearly have an interest in mainframe but they provide citations): https://www.precisely.com/blog/mainframe/9-mainframe-statistics https://www.precisely.com/blog/mainframe/9-mainframe-statist...
- bla3 6y ago
  Why should open-source projects shoulder the cost of "every single financial system"? These are run by for-profit companies. They can pay for running their software, or the can open source their stuff. Right now, they try to externalize their cost and keep the profits. That makes sense for them if they can pull it off, but it's a clear downside to the affected projects.
- acdha 6y ago
  > Why would an open source project reject commits for mainframe support? Because you don't personally use one in your business? By that logic we should dump 99% of the drivers in Linux because I personally don't have a need for them. I think it’s less a hard rejection than a realistic analysis of the support costs. Platform support is expensive and the extremely wealthy companies using mainframes tend not to contribute resources on an ongoing basis. A really big one is CI & other infrastructure: if you actually want to have a project support your platform, the developers need to be able to run tests regularly including things like proprietary licensed compilers. Getting an open source project to support a platform really requires stepping up here since otherwise you’re just getting the untested illusion of support.

by bla3 6y ago

tw04 6y ago

>But for the projects there's little upside and it forces them to spend reviewer time on a system basically nobody uses. If someone waved a magical wand and disappeared every mainframe on the planet right now, every single financial system on the planet would collapse with it. Why would an open source project reject commits for mainframe support? Because you don't personally use one in your business? By that logic we should dump 99% of the drivers in Linux because I personally don't have a need for them. (yes these folks clearly have an interest in mainframe but they provide citations): https://www.precisely.com/blog/mainframe/9-mainframe-statistics https://www.precisely.com/blog/mainframe/9-mainframe-statist...

bla3 6y ago
Why should open-source projects shoulder the cost of "every single financial system"? These are run by for-profit companies. They can pay for running their software, or the can open source their stuff. Right now, they try to externalize their cost and keep the profits. That makes sense for them if they can pull it off, but it's a clear downside to the affected projects.
acdha 6y ago
> Why would an open source project reject commits for mainframe support? Because you don't personally use one in your business? By that logic we should dump 99% of the drivers in Linux because I personally don't have a need for them. I think it’s less a hard rejection than a realistic analysis of the support costs. Platform support is expensive and the extremely wealthy companies using mainframes tend not to contribute resources on an ongoing basis. A really big one is CI & other infrastructure: if you actually want to have a project support your platform, the developers need to be able to run tests regularly including things like proprietary licensed compilers. Getting an open source project to support a platform really requires stepping up here since otherwise you’re just getting the untested illusion of support.