Re: COMMON attempting to add AIX to the mix...

[Glenn Ericson <glenn-ericson@xxxxxxx>]

Scott
are you suggesting this is to pull AIX users in and convert them to 
traditional
system i  methodologies and development processes?

        Glenn

At 04:30 PM 12/16/2008, Scott Klement wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> > It would appear that COMMON now wants to be your AIX users group as well as
> > the traditional iSeries(or whatever).
> >
> > What do you guys think of this move?
>
> I think there's a ton of good that can come from this.  COMMON has
> promised not to cut back at all on IBM i education and offerings -- they
> are looking at this as expansion, not replacement.  That's a good thing,
> because it (potentially) could make COMMON stronger.
>
> After all, from a hardware perspective we do share the same hardware
> that the AIX folks use.  There are a bunch of sessions that could
> (perhaps with small tweaks) apply to either group purely for that
> reason.  Why NOT encourage additional membership into COMMON?
>
>  From the software point of view, I wouldn't view this purely as having
> both AIX software and IBM i software.  Rather, it gives businesses some
> choice.
>
> For example, there's really no good business-oriented programming
> language on AIX.  Why not show AIX users the advantages of RPG?  Or of
> the integrated database?  Or of some of the fine software packages shown
> in the expo?  To run IBM i and take advantage of it's awesome
> business-oriented capabilities, an AIX shop only has to run an IBM i
> partition on their existing Power hardware.  That's a good thing for the
> IBM i community -- we can bring in new customers/users.
>
> It also offers the same sort of features in the other direction, of
> course...  there may be advantages to having an AIX partition.
> Especially when you look at the volume of open source packages that run
> on AIX but not on IBM i.
>
> It seems to me that this has the potential to breathe new life into our
> platform.  I don't understand the negativity...
>
> There are certainly challenges, though.  One big one is the fact that
> AIX people don't really think of themselves as "AIX people".  Not in the
>   way that we think of ourselves as "IBM i people". They don't really
> consider themselves part of an "AIX community". Instead, they consider
> themselves Unix people, and part of a Unix community...  that might make
> it hard to convince them to come to an "AIX/IBM i conference".  They
> might be more interested in going to a more general Unix conference...
> as David points out, there's a lot of competition there.
>
> So, I guess we'll see what happens.  But I think it's a great idea.
> --
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