> in most parts software support for Power 9 is now in par with x86 and ARM. I very much doubt this. > we need affordable Power hardware quickly to keep and

> in most parts software support for Power 9 is now in par with x86 and ARM. I very much doubt this. > we need affordable Power hardware quickly to keep and expand the momentum. Possibly, but the POWER architecture would get (a lot ?) more traction if the entities behind it made VMs with OS distros easily available for ensuring FOSS builds and works on them. This is much less of a challenge than making cheap hardware available. Travis CI - the way it used to be anyway before they started asking for money even from FOSS developers - is a good example of how this could be offered. It was very easy to set this up for your FOSS repository (on GitHub at least - but IBM would need be more welcoming than that), and from that point it wasn't that hard. For some larger projects, direct interaction may be even more readily effective, e.g. getting in touch with maintainers of Linux and with BSD distributions, with the Document Foundation for LibreOffice support (maybe it's already supported?) etc. --- If this happens in parallel (or before) reasonably-cheap hardware is available, then I would expect more "buy-in", figuratively and literally.