RE: Open Source RPG ?

["Chris Payne" <CPayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nobody who works on a P5 will have any interest in RPG, which they will
consider a strange backward language from a proprietary platform.
Opening the language to the open source community will probably be a
flop because the open source community has traditionally been very good
with technical applications (like operating systems and compilers) and
very bad with applications for other domains (business software and
computer games), I just can't see enough excitement to get people to put
there time into RPG. Additionally the P5 programmers already have a wide
variety of languages that they use and are comfortable with C, C++,
Java, Perl and on and on.  RPG lives and dies with the iSeries.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Richter
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 11:36 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Open Source RPG ?

On 4/12/06, David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Neil Palmer wrote:
> > 1) Would you be in favor of IBM Open Sourcing RPG ?
> >     (give reasons why or why not if you want)
>
> To gain what?

survival.

>
> It's not like RPG is a popular language in the open source community
...
> and what would the advantage be?  Rapid adaptation to modern
> technologies?  One of the strengths of RPG (indeed the iSeries, or
> whatever it's called today, itself) is stability.  To make the RPG
> compiler open source invites customizations ... what happens when a
> vendor takes the RPG compiler and customizes it to their own end ...
> nobody else would be able to use programs based on that customization
> without having the modified compiler source.  This makes things less
> stable.  Plus, modifications to the compiler would probably not go
> through the same rigorous QA that IBM does.

wait a minute. I thought QA was a selling point for open source.  
This system of ours is fading into oblivion. The only ways to save it
are massive R&D by IBM or open sourcing the entire OS.  Either way it
should run on the p5 and be priced at AIX and Linux levels.  IBM
should use the OS as a way to sell DB2 and p5 hardware.

-Steve