3 ms·

Wow. There is a fortune to be made for a company to support a commercial fork of this project, as there are a tonne of corporations locked into IBM mainframes.

• bri3d 12y ago
  A company called PSI had this idea in the early 2000s, and built a binary translation layer much faster than Hercules which ran z/OS on Itanium. They rapidly got sued by IBM, tried to counter-sue on antitrust / unfair competition grounds, and (amusingly, when you consider the suit) ended up selling to IBM instead. In addition to patents and the standard "thou shalt not reverse engineer" licensing clause, IBM also contractually bind their customers to run z/OS on only their hardware, although they also maintain a first-party emulator for development and test situations which don't demand a real zSeries. I don't think Hercules would do fantastically as a commercial fork anyway - it's a great tool for play and development, but using it also basically eliminates any of the reasons to buy a mainframe in the first place - you certainly don't get lock-step / verified execution, lots of IO channels, or hot-swappable core hardware by using an emulator.
  • kjs3 12y ago
    IBM apparently turned it's jaundiced legal eye towards Hercules at one point. Apparently, they decided it wasn't worth crushing them. I like to think they saw the value of something like Hercules out in the wild, but I imagine there's something less idealistic involved.