Re: Merlin -- MIDRANGE-L

Like every other publicly-traded company in America, IBM is a slave to
quarterly results and chained to year-end results. I'd guess people on the
RDi product side of the house have an aspirational plan (where funding is
no object) and a practical plan (which reflects funding realities); they
strive to get the practical plan funded. But quarter-to-quarter turmoil
can spell the end of any initiative and only a few IBM'ers know about the
Great Stuff on the drawing board for us but only to have it cancelled
faster than a USAID contract.

Outsourcing RDi maintenance to Forta is interesting. We can dream the
IBM'ers formerly supporting RDi are working on Great Stuff (not yet
cancelled...). Or, perhaps Fortra's team members with no product baggage
will put a new spin on the app and make it more VS Code-like. We don't
know if IBM pursued Forta or vice versa--maybe Fortra really wanted to take
over RDi (I'm betting IBM will sell RDi to Fortra in the next year or so).
Forta now has the ability to guide the direction of RDi and that will make
it easier to sell their RDi add-on's. A much bleaker read on the situation
is teminating a contract with a vendor is usually less painful and less
expensive than rehoming, buying out, or laying off employees.

But IBM "c"orporate's message is clear: RDi is not important. I'm using
the lower-case "c" because I doubt such a decision gets the attention of
anybody in Armonk (which only cares about mainframe hardware and
services--they couldn't care less about software). I empathize with the
IBM'ers who worked hard to get RDi where it is today: far, far better than
WDSCI!

But business is business: there's a spreadsheet with red and blue lines on
some Mac somewhere in some IBMer's office. When the red line crosses the
blue line, the lawyers get called in and they'll kill the i, an
ahead-of-its-time, extraordinarily imaginative product that broke the rules
on TCO, helped customers prosper, and gave many on this list a good living
(and deep personal satisfaction). It will be a slow and agonizing death:
the System/32 was announced a few months after I joined IBM and I've spend
2/3's of my life--50+ years--committed to it. I think of HAL-9000 as David
Bowman is pulling out modules..."Daisy, Daisy,..."

Before a cliff slides into the ocean, a few rocks and trees shake loose...

On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 2:32 PM Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The only thing I would add is this:

If you are developing reports or screens with RLU or SDA, PDM or RDI are
your only options.

I don't believe VS Code, Merlin, etc have a mechanism to support the older
stuff. And from what I hear there's nothing in the works for that.

Unfortunately that means RPG developers can't really go fully to VS Code
without those mechanisms unless they want to hand code DDS keywords.

Although for editing RPG definitely VS Code all day.

Let's just hope PDM/SDA/RLU don't go away for another decade or so, unless
there's a secret project brewing alongside AI stuff 😊

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

----------------------------------------------------------------------

message: 1
date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 15:40:43 -0500
from: Jim Oberholtzer <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Merlin

Well, they have not made that statement. That said, when creating Merlin,
IBM spent a good deal of money getting the VSCode extensions ready and
integrating into Merlin. So why do that if RDI is the direction? When
you hear IBM call a program strategic ,as I?ve heard about RDI, that
usually means it?s close to end of development. Maybe not true in RDIs case
since they?ve outsourced it to Fortra but ya gotta wonder.

Also, VSCode runs about anywhere without issues, VS. the drama that
accompanies any Windows update. Again, coincidence? I think not.

Ask IBM and you?ll get a great non-answer.

Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

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