In my opinion, the marketing and legal group at IBM (for decades) must have this for their mission statement: "Let's see how quickly we can sink this business!"

In my opinion, the marketing and legal group at IBM (for decades) must have this for their mission statement: "Let's see how quickly we can sink this business!". They're completely inept. Examples? - Customers: "Can we license z/OS, z/VM, and other IBM mainframe software to run on Hercules (mainframe emulator) for DR purposes?" IBM: "we'll sue your ass out of existence!" - POWER5 brought some pretty amazing virtualization technology allowing for 'micro LPARS' down to 1/10 of a CPU [0]. It's gotten even better since then. When and where have you ever heard about these capabilities? They're part of what used to be called APV (now branded as PowerVM) [1]. - At one time you could buy a used RS/6000 off of eBay (or from a reseller) and get a legal license (and media) for AIX. To do this today with modern Power systems, you have to first put the hardware under maintenance agreement. Oh, and if the server wasn't already under a maintenance agreement ('SWMA') (or there's been a lapse since it was under maintenance), you have to pay an additional fee ('ALF'). How much are these fees? SWMA estimate is $1800 PER YEAR. ALF estimate is $3200 (one time, unless you have a lapse in SWMA and need to do ALF again). Since Power8, you have to buy a separate HMC (nearly $2000) to configure LPARS. Net result is that it has become cost prohibitive for individuals to buy a second-hand POWER system and run latest AIX or i. - Want to get IBM's C or C++ compiler for AIX? There are 3 pricing options [2] available: $5780 per user, $17500 per concurrent user, or $88.60 per VPC per month. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-Partitioning [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVM [2] https://www.ibm.com/products/open-xl-cpp-aix-compiler-power/pricing