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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

IBM has had this argument internally for eons.

When i was there, two decades ago, people were making presentations internally saying the same thing - "without affordable volume machines that random people can buy and use to develop, this ecosystem will fail"

Then, like now, there were even organizations/companies people thought might eventually take care of doing this that weren't IBM (Spoiler alert: They didn't)

Given that it has been at least two decades, i'm not sure whether that makes the doomsayers wrong or right.

But I am sure of one thing: IBM didn't care to do it then, and doesn't seem likely to start caring to do it now

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Warning: rant (sorta)

I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source development on non-x86 were gravitating away from POWER/PowerPC towards ARM. The affordable hardware was a major selling point.

His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. But that is of course not interesting for someone who runs a home lab and works on Linux distros.

And even so, the blog post still does not aim to where they need to aim. Raptor systems are far from "affordable" for your average CS undergraduate or hobbyist. Power Pi's $250 target price is still off by almost an order of magnitude. The $250+ market is served by second-hand POWER servers, which are ok for home labs. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and IBM in their infinite wisdom decided to drop POWER8 support from upcoming releases, which will drive away home labs and the open source community further from Power.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2...

>His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud.

Yeah the mainframe community asked ibm to open some newer systems >24bit but ibm told them they want to provide the community with new "actual" software...out of that came that stupid program called "master the mainframe" or "IBM Z Xplore" it's unbelievable that they are so tone-deaf even to the most loyal IBM fans...IBM is the perfect example of a marketing/management and anti-engineer company (as of today), they really deserve to have a slow death.

I think Debian still supports POWER8 (and has unofficial ports for 32-bit PowerPC and for big-endian POWER).

The problem about Ubuntu dropping POWER8 support isn't that hardware owners won't find another distro to run.

The problem is that home lab owners who develop on their second-hand POWER8 hardware can no longer have the same software environment as the POWER9 systems running latest Ubuntu that they deploy to. And Ubuntu is very popular in the Cloud.

Yeah IBM is crazy with z/OS too, give out free z/OS developer images so everyone interested could play with it and maybe it sparks interest in mainframe again? NONONO pay ~500$ every year and you need a usb-dongle, and "master the mainframe" is just open for 2 month a year...it's pure stupidity.

PASemi was stopped by an acqui-hire. I don't like counterfactuals, but that was a huge transfer of expertise from Power to ARM

I mean, this is true, but it doesn't really change a lot of what i said. It was always something :)

If your ecosystem is stopped in its tracks because someone acquired a small company, it is not a particularly robust ecosystem.

From what i was told (and i was very young and inexperienced when i worked at IBM, so take it with a grain of salt), the baseline issue was always the same on the IBM side - the chip groups controlled most of the budget for the chips, and didn't see any way that spending hundreds of millions to make developer-friendly hardware would have positive ROI. Most of their revenue was not derived from the customers they thought this might ever attract.

It's similar to why they told Apple to go pound sand repeatedly until Apple switched to Intel - Apple did not make up a really meaningful part of the business of Power chips from where they sat, so they didn't really care about giving Apple what it wanted.

The software folks involved thought this was mostly insane

This is starting to feel a lot like the DEC Alpha, at least from the perspective of the 3rd party motherboards.

The ubiquity of x86 and ARM does not leave much room for the Power architecture in the general market.

Or is it the Power architecture who is not bringing much on the table for the price? (except radiation hardened chips, where money is not important)

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