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Top Sessions at COMMON: A Barometer for the OS/400 Market's Interests

After every COMMON trade show, the organization releases a list of the top sessions, ranked by the number of attendees who tried to jam into those sessions. There are always a few that are standing-room only, notably any session by iSeries chief architect Frank Soltis, who manages to fill a room even after the expo has closed and many people have packed up and gone home.

The list of top sessions is an excellent barometer of what really matters in the OS/400 market to the people who wrestle with it every day, not as a business or opportunity but as a tool that they have invested capital in and must get some use out of. You can draw your own conclusions about what this top-sessions list means, but we think it shows that OS/400 programmers and managers are interested in a healthy mix of new and vintage technologies and professional growth as much as technical proficiency. This is exactly the mix of issues that our newsletters try to address on a weekly basis. Here's the list:

1. Embedding SQL into Application Programs (Alison Butterill)
2. RPG IV: RPG at V5R2--It Keeps Growing and Growing (Jon Paris)
3. A Vision for the iSeries (Frank Soltis)
4. Introduction to XML (Susan Gantner)
5. RPG IV: Subprocedures--The Basics (Jon Paris)
6. (tie) Success through Creativity! (Randall Munson)
7. (tie) RPG IV: The Power of Prototyping (Jon Paris)
8. RPG IV: Subprocedures--Beyond the Basics (Jon Paris)
9. (tie) OS/400 Security Fundamentals (Carol Woodbury)
10. (tie) Get a Life! (Trevor Perry)
11. (tie) Integrated File System: Fundamentals (Tom McBride)
12. How to Deliver a Great Technical Presentation! (Randall Munson)
13. Single Sign-on Enablement (Patrick Botz)
14. Introduction to the Integrated File System (Dave Boutcher)
15. Enhance Your 5250 GUI Access with HATS LE (Carole Miner)
16. WebFacing 5250 Applications with WebSphere Development Studio (Claus Weiss)
17. ILE by Example (Paul Tuohy)
18. Security Opening Session: Overview of Cybercrime Efforts in Florida (Bob Breeden)
19. What's So Different About Men and Women? (Becky Schmieding)
20. RPG IV: RPG at V5R1--Bigger and Better than Ever! (Jon Paris)
21. (tie) Overcoming the Fear of Speaking (Randall Munson)
22. (tie) RPG Skills for the New Millennium (Paul Tuohy)
23. Introduction to HTML: What Is It and How to Use It (Melissa Anderson)
24. What Is WebSphere? (Kevin Larsen)

U.S. Tech Workers Experiencing Angst

IT workers in the United States are feeling "angst" over offshoring and outsourcing, according to a survey commissioned by WashTech, the alliance of technical workers in Washington State, which is part of the Communications Workers of America Union. Both issues have been hot topics for about a year, and are now making their way into the mainstream press and political circles. The WashTech study was conducted by polling firms Evans/McDonough and Harris International. The survey indicates that U.S. tech workers are worried about declining wages, benefits that get skinnier by the year, and about offshoring of work overseas.

About 25 percent of the 410 people responding to the survey of IT workers said that their company had moved work in their IT department to overseas facilities. Some 20 percent said that they had been required by their employer to train their replacements before getting the ax, or they know someone who had to do it. About 75 percent of those polled said they thought H1-B visas and similar foreign worker programs were unnecessary, given the large pool of unemployed IT workers in America, and 81 percent said they would like to see laws that restrict the use of such visa programs. Some 93 percent of IT workers polled said they were worried about the offshoring of jobs, 91 percent of them were registered voters, and 87 percent said they vote in major elections. Those are big numbers for any politician, particularly for those seeking to garner the support of motivated, relatively well-off, connected voters, as IT workers tend to be. And the issue cuts across political boundaries. About 41 percent of those polled were Republicans, 26 percent were Democrats, and 32 percent were not affiliated with any party but were mostly politically active.

The politicians who control Uncle Sam's purse strings in Congress could set a good example by employing indigenous IT workers for government contracts. About 86 percent of the IT workers polled said they would support a law that would compel the U.S. government to do its own IT work at home. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, introduced the "Jobs for America" bill, which would force public companies to disclose how many jobs they are sending overseas, where they are going, and why they are being sent overseas.

In introducing the bill, Daschle said the Bush administration's policy has been to embrace outsourcing and offshoring. "This is Alice in Wonderland economics," he said. "America has lost 2.9 million private sector jobs since January 2001. Nearly every state in the nation has lost manufacturing jobs, and contrary to the Administration's economic theories, there is nothing good about it. The administration is putting corporate profits ahead of American jobs. And the exporting of jobs is hurting millions of Americans and countless communities across the country." Senators Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts), Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York), and Debbie Stabenow (Michigan) are cosponsors of the bill. The proposed bill would require any company that lays off 15 or more workers to send those jobs overseas to give three months' notice to those employees and to send reports to the Department of Labor so it can monitor the effects of offshoring. Quite frankly, no one knows how many jobs are being offshored, and this is one of the problems with the phenomenon.

Play the Tech Worker Challenge

Why did the tech worker cross the four-lane highway? To try to keep his job.

If you like gallows humor and video games, you are going to love a new game on the TechsUnite site called The Tech Worker Challenge. TechsUnite is an online community for IT workers; it is not a union.

The object of the game is to get as many IT workers across the highway as you can without being hit by vehicles that represent Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Intel. We wonder if Craig Barrett, Sam Palmisano, Scott McNealy, Carly Fiorina, and Bill Gates are actually driving the trucks in the game. Wouldn't that be funny? Then again, maybe not.

PeopleSoft Rejects Oracle's Bid, DoJ Frowns on Deal, Too

Oracle might have sweetened its bid for rival application software maker PeopleSoft two weeks ago to a $9.4 billion all-cash offer, but PeopleSoft has decided the deal does not adequately value the company. Moreover, says PeopleSoft, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division has submitted a report to Hewitt Pate, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust issues, which against allowing Oracle to acquire PeopleSoft. The Justice Department is expected to make a ruling on the issue no later than March 2.

Plenty of people are talking conspiracy theory on this deal. Oracle low-balled its initial bid for PeopleSoft right after PeopleSoft acquired JD Edwards, which made PeopleSoft a much better rival to Oracle's own application software unit. Many people think that Oracle launched the takeover bid just to be a spoiler. But Oracle has to be careful, because a disingenuous takeover bid might land it in court if PeopleSoft contends that Oracle just did this to mess up PeopleSoft's business.

If Oracle was looking for a way to wiggle out of the proposed PeopleSoft deal without invoking the wrath of the government for launching a definitely hostile but not quite real takeover, this sounds like the ticket. With the antitrust commissioners in Europe murmuring that it doesn't like the deal, either, Oracle doesn't look like it could acquire PeopleSoft for any amount of money, whether it wants to or not.

SCO Ups the Ante in IBM Unix-Linux Lawsuit to $5 Billion

It's been almost a year since The SCO Group launched its Unix-Linux lawsuit against IBM, and the damages that SCO is seeking have continually risen ever since. The initial suit, which alleges that IBM let loose Unix-related intellectual property owned by SCO into the Linux operating system, and that IBM is in violation of the Unix licensing agreement at the heart of its AIX operating system, was originally set at $1 billion in damages. Last summer, as the legal briefs were flying back and forth between the two parties, SCO raised the ante to $3 billion, after claiming additional violations by IBM. Now SCO has raised the damages to $5 billion.

SCO is now claiming that IBM is violating its copyrights, but it has dropped the claim that IBM has violated trade secrets related to SCO's development of Unix and the rights to the trade secrets owned by SCO when it acquired the rights to Unix from Novell nearly a decade ago, which bought them from AT&T. SCO is now trying to get a recent copy of the source code for AIX 5L and the last release of Dynix/ptx, the Sequent Unix variant, so it can assess exactly how much of this code was moved into Linux 2.4. So far, SCO has been apparently working with older versions of the AIX and Dynix/ptx code, and has only been able to identify snippets adding up to a few thousand lines of code. This is in stark contrast to the millions of lines that it thought it would find.

If these lines of code have indeed been lifted from the AIX or Dynix/ptx variants of Unix and moved into Linux, as SCO suggests, you can bet that IBM will begin arguing about what does and does not constitute a derivative work. And you can also bet that Novell will be tag-teaming with IBM, asserting that some of the rights that SCO claims to have over Unix--such as copyright--are not in its control, but rather Novell's.

Last week, in an even more bizarre twist, Novell waived SCO's rights to sue IBM concerning any matter relating to Unix, a right it claims that it retained through the retaining of Unix copyrights. Whether SCO or Novell actually controls the copyrights related to Unix will be the subject of a lawsuit pending between those two parties.

These cases are going to be plenty ugly once they go to trial, and since Unix and now Linux is in one way or another embedded in modern operating systems, it affects the 18 million servers out there in the world.

Get the Latest OS/400 PTF Guide

Our partner DLB Associates has been keeping track of IBM's PTF updates to OS/400 and its related programs. Here are the latest OS/400 PTF Guides:

January 17

January 24

January 31

February 7

February 14