Talk:Hercules (emulator)

message: Are all those older IBM operating systems "public domain"? VM/CMS certainly is not, to pick an example. Is there some other phrase or word we could use here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by BBCWatcher (talk • contribs) 
:Why are they not? They were published in the US before 1978, without any copyright notice. IBM considers that public domain. I'm not going to argue with them. Jay Maynard 16:05, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The term "VM/CMS" is probably too generic.. VM/370 was available at no charge.. The others (VM/SEPP, VM/BSEPP, VM/SP, VM/HPO, VMXA/SF VMXA/SP, VM/ESA, z/VM) which can still be referred to as *VM/CMS* are For charge Licensed System Products.--Ivan Scott Warren 01:38, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed VM/CMS to VM/370. Jay Maynard 15:17, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Do you know of any IBM documents that say anything about IBM's view of this matter? You say "IBM considers that public domain," and I presume they must have indicated this to Hercules developers in some way. It would be helpful if we could find something that could be cited. There is a great deal of conflicting opinion about what constitutes public domain (and much of it is no doubt wrong). Trevor Hanson 17:57, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would dearly love to be able to put my hands on documentation to that effect. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen. I spoke to one of IBM's intellectual property lawyers in Poughkeepsie a few years ago by phone, and he told me that IBM considers anything they published before 1978 witout a copyright statement to be in the public domain - but he would not put that in writing for me. At one time, Rick Fochtman, the guy who first distributed OS/360 on CD-ROM, did have a letter stating that OS/360 was in the public domain and he could freely distribute it, but he was not able to lay hands on it when I asked him for a copy. Jay Maynard 18:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Hmm, yes I guess you would. :) This is not surprising on IBM's part of course. It must all mean that this is de facto public domain software, but that IBM hasn't made an official release or declaration to that effect; they are either saying "what we did has probably caused it to become public domain" or "we could prove we still own it but there's no advantage in making a fuss". This may also explain why there is such divided opinion about the status and use of source code distribution "back then". At the time, though, I'll bet that source code use was governed by licensing terms. (All those sites were under NDAs anyway.) Well, at your leisure, see if my current description of source code distribution in this section now agrees with your understanding. Trevor Hanson 19:25, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That description works for me. As for the public-domainness of older OSes, my discussions with both IBM and other intellectual property lawyers convinced me that anything published in the US before 1978 without an explicit copyright claim was, in fact, public domain in the legal sense and not just the de facto sense. I believe IBM made their non-program product OSes public domain at least in part because of the ongiong antitrust lawsuit; I don't know if it was required by the consent decree or not, but the fact that their OSes were public domain was something plug-compatible manufacturers such as Amdahl and Magnusson took full advantage of. There were no licensing terms, such as NDAs, involved at all. Jay Maynard 20:04, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Which answers a question I have long had about how the PCMs got access to their OS software. My firsthand experience with Amdahls was at NCSS, where this did not enter into the equation; but I always wondered about the way MVS Amdahl sites got access to the OS. I had assumed that it was licensed separately by IBM directly to the customer as a software license. Your explanation is much more plausible. Thanks for the input. Trevor Hanson 21:16, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Public Domain? 

message: A  template was just added, complaining that "The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter." Reading it over, the introduction seems pretty clear to me. What does the editor have in mind? What aspects of the introduction are missing or confusing? Trevor Hanson 11:00, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Insufficient context? 

message: :Image:Hercules-logo.gif is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
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BetacommandBot (talk) 17:45, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair use rationale added. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 15:51, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Hercules-logo.gif

message: The first paragraph in "Example Usage" references a screenshot of an unbooted system, with all counters at 0, but no such shot is in the article. Should a screenshot be added, or the paragraph edited?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.216.83.114 (talk) 23:58, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing Screenshot in Example Usage? 

message: The paragraph added by Mike Schwab on 12 Dec 2007 under the heading "Background" which starts "In November 2007, efforts to compile GCCMVS on the Turnkey 3 Update Beta failed..." and ends "Persons with appropriate expertise are encouraged to join Hercules-OS/380 Yahoo Group ..." is inappropriate for an encyclopedia article. It begins like an episode from a soap opera, and it ends like an recruitment advertisement for a sourceforge project. It introduces new terms (GCCMVS, Turnkey 3 Update Beta, System/380) without explaining them or their relationship to the Hercules emulator. The subject matter of this paragraph is only marginally related to the Hercules emulator, and belongs, if anywhere, in its own Wikipedia article. A more general remark about the possibility of modifying Hercules to produce a customized version capable of implementing a non-standard architecture might be appropriate here -- Roger Bowler 21:04, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paragraph about MVS/380 is inappropriate 

message: "Processing power alone is only a small part of a larger picture. Mainframes are renowned for reliability, disk I/O performance, their ability to handle many concurrent tasks, their licensed software, and other unique attributes. These aspects are lacking on most desktop or notebook PCs available to the hobbyist, though less so on server-class platforms. Even though Hercules may be capable of performing more instructions per second than some smaller mainframes, I/O bottlenecks may degrade performance"
I deleted this paragraph because it looks more like an article of faith than a fact. Roger Bowler 05:29, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You should put it back.  I/O capabilities of a mainframe are much higher than any microcomputer can handle.  Call me when you can attach hundreds of consoles, tape drives, disk drives, printers and other I/O bits to a microcomputer at the same time and have them all be able to talk to each other. Microcomputers simply do not have the I/O subsystems that mainframes do. That's because mainframes and microcomputers solve different problems.  It's not an article of faith.  It's physical reality - microcomputers do not have the hardware.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.181.49.187 (talk) 20:29, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Articles of faith 

message: "Several Linux distributions include ports for ESA/390 and some also include a separate z/Architecture port, the most popular being SUSE Linux Enterprise Server."
Says who? This may have been true five year ago, but today RHEL and SLES are neck and neck in the Z market. Unless someone can cite some recent data, I'd vote to remove this and just list all the zLinux OS distros equally. Swapdisk (talk) 21:12, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  SLES most popular? 

message: It should be obvious by now, but I am indeed the maintainer of Hercules and leader of the project. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 07:59, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Declaration of interest 

message: I'd like to update this article, but there's some info missing: Why did TurboHercules want IBM to license z/OS to TurboHercules customers?
Wasn't the whole point of Hercules to make z/OS unnecessary?
Or was "z/OS" more than just the operating system - maybe z/OS is an operating system plus a bunch of applications and Hercules just makes the operating system unnecessary and they wanted their customers to be able to buy z/OS as a way to get the IBM applications? 
(turbohercules.com is down - did the company close?)
Thanks. Gronky (talk) 09:49, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Hercules is purely a hardware emulator. It needs an OS to run on it, just as a hardware mainframe does. It can run MVS, Linux, VM/370...and z/OS, too. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 17:28, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Aha. thanks. Gronky (talk) 20:38, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

text: Improving the article will take a bit more research.  I won't get to it this week, but I will be back. Gronky (talk) 00:45, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  What did TurboHercules want from IBM? 

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thread_title:  External links modified