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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would probably be more diverse if everyone could use the ISA.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON

http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/729/why-did-the-esa...

The SPARC ISA is completely unencumbered as far as I know, and there are several copyleft implementations of the architecture that are synthesized into interesting products, often from overseas vendors (for example Navspark: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/navspark-arduino-compatib... )

Yeah, but ISAs exhibit so strong network effects that anything not x86/amd64 or ARM is irrelevant, sadly.

Well, there's OpenRISC[1] and I believe SPARC is too. At least there are open source implementations including Sun's first Niagara.

[1]http://www.openrisc.net/

I miss Sun's brand of idealism before profits sometimes.

Yea, it is sad that Jonathan Schwartz had problems too.

I miss Sun's "use our enterprise software, only pay if you need support" licensing. Oracle deep-sixed that as soon as possible, along with the pseudo-hobbyist licensing terms for the OS, effectively killing a large portion of the hobbyist and "sysadmin with a setup at home" market.

I ran (well, still do) a website dedicated to Sun/Solaris hardware and software users, was on the OpenSolaris external pre-release beta testing team/group, and heard lots of moaning about this, even from sales people within Oracle itself.

Pre-Oracle Sun was gracious and gave me a loaded SunFire T1000 to run the site and mailing lists, etc, on. Post-Sun Oracle gave me the finger.

If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.

Serious question: can the zSeries do full-duplex terminal communications or the modern equivalent?

I first started using EMACS shortly after various IBM systems, and it's hard to express how obnoxious it was to have your keyboard lock while the computer was sending you stuff....

The question is serious because it's not clear to me the use cases of the zSeries including supporting this sort of thing (vs. editing your files on another computer like your PC before submitting them to the mainframe ... but I haven't touched anything in that domain since ... 1978 I think).

I don't think a 3270 would be very comfortable for Emacs. I once saw a 3278 hooked to a 390 running Unix (I don't think it was AIX) and seeing text scroll on a 3278 was interestingly alien. Running Emacs would be doable, but most 3270 editors I can remember (low 80's) took advantage of the local terminal smarts and worked on a form/page based concept. Emacs was designed for the VT-100 world where terminals were not particularly smart.

Having said that, you can host Linux VMs under zVM. Binaries will use the zSeries ISA and the whole guest will run under the zVM environment. You can easily ssh to it. IIRC, Debian, Red Hat and SuSe support it.

This would probably be the least cost-effective way to edit text. On the other hand, few terminals were able to render monospaced text so beautifully.

You can just SSH into a modern z. It has a full POSIX environment, so you could run real EMACS.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library...

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=...

But we're not talking about FOSS. We're talking about software in general, and some types of software can't be sustained by any traditional FOSS monetization model. These kinds of software will usually be distributed as binaries, and you'll just have to switch to whatever OS and ISA the developers care to compile for.

It was about open-source hardware: monopolies can limit freedom in hardware too. The Pentium FDIV bug was trivial to validate at that time, since it was common even for an undergraduate at a small university to have accounts on Sun SPARCS, HP PA-RISC, and DEC Alpha in addition to POWER Macs and Windows x86. And there were other choices in the ecosystem like SGI MIPS.

Granted, that may seem like ancient history, but RDRAND is an indication that Intel still makes mistakes.

Less fragmentation is more efficient in many ways, but just like any monoculture, it is also fragile.

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