All you have ever wanted to know about Linux on the mainframe

Re:All you have ever wanted to know about Linux on the mainf... by jbarham on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @12:56AM (#2304028)

"Continuous development" on the mainframe? Hah!

My first job out of university in 1996 was doing COBOL programming on mainframes for the federal government of Canada, and my first project was to rewrite a program originally written in 1972 that had changed very little since then. I have little doubt that after almost 15 years my rewrite is still much the same.

Anyway, I quickly realized that the mainframe environment doesn't exactly foster technical innovation so I moved on and am quite happy to have not sat in front a "green screen" in over a decade.

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Re:All you have ever wanted to know about Linux on the mainf... by mweatherill on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @02:20AM (#2304191)

Your experience is with an application running on a mainframe and is probably typical. The OP was referring to the OS itself which is continuously developed with fanatical dedication to backwards compatibility.

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Re:All you have ever wanted to know about Linux on the mainf... by Someone on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @04:49AM (#2304415)

That "fanatical dedication to backwards compatibility" works even harder towards glacial development for the OS than for applications. Or do you think OS developers will ship a new, faster scheduler, tweak the memory allocator and the thread scheduler every month?

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Re:All you have ever wanted to know about Linux on the mainf... by rbanffy on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @06:59AM (#2304623)

Plus, you won't get five nines reliability if you tweak the kernel every week.

Mainframes are built to never stop, to never give you a headache and to never, ever surprise you.

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