TL;DR. I am no less worried about the future of products using opensource on IBM i than I am on any other system, I might actually be more scared of closed
proprietary solutions.
Liam, you first... We use everything that makes sense, nodejs included. However we don't use node to serve anything to end-users in production; Developers use it in build systems on their PC's and we use it in devops on the server :)
Torbjörn:
About your question...
Some time ago, I was able to talk to some IBM people about opensource on i, (mainly Mark Irish and Steve Will), where I posed the question of long term support and maintenance of OSS on IBM i? - Their comment was a bit vague, but basically my take from their answer was that things they deem important, they will support, like nodejs... I note that as I see it, other platforms handle this by actually being opensource (ideologically) at least as far as software that is GPL'd or similar is concerned.
By releasing their modified source, I can help bug fix, fork the code and maintain it myself if needed, and based on that fact, I can choose to use it or not. While IBM i is "porting" a lot of these tools that I am used to, to the platform, I couldn't really find a place, where I can download this ported source and fork my own copy, so from an IBM i users perspective, it might as well have been closed-sourced, I don't know if this has changed today, I seem to remember having seen some OSS projects get merge requests with ppc64 code, but legal issues aside; This fact is what makes opensource valuable (and safe) to me. I am grateful, but not dependant, on IBM or some else supporting it, and need not fear if they deem it unworthy in 10 years time.
More fodder for discussion...
I had never heard of nodever until installing nodejs on IBM i, so detaching nodejs from nodever doesn't scare me in the slightest, infact, I've always wondered why that odd dependency existed in the first place. Switching to something like update-alternatives makes sense in this ecosystem, and getting rid of that weird dependency, that doesn't exists on any other systems running node is fine by me. The more IBM i streamlines their opensource offerings to behave like the rest of the world (#MakeThisPlatformNormal) the better.
I've actually been holding lightning talks during the breaks at conferences ( well, not so much this year :) ), on the topic of opensource on IBM i and the relevance. Having used Unix/Linux for almost as long as OS/400 (in years, I have (a lot) more man hours in Linux today), and being an avid user of Linux on Power (and everywhere else), I still prefer some things to run on a separate partition using freely available cores, as it frees up the resources for things that can only run on my i. That said, I am immensely happy with what is going on with the platform these last years, and something as simply as having tmux, vim, curl, grep etc. "officially" available, is a huge win for me, and all the youngster we hire to work for us.
Closed and proprietary solutions are deprecated or have breaking changes as well. In those cases, I feel left with few options but "to obey".
- Jens Churchill.
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Jens Churchill
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Original Message:
Sent: Mon November 02, 2020 02:39 AM
From: Torbjörn Appehl
Subject: Node.js on IBM i
so, none. I am not a developer after all haha... BUT, I read this article this morning and wonder how big deal it is with the open source market that moves around so quickly. https://powerwire.eu/bye-bye-nodever do you have any concerns that the code you write today might not work in x years?
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Torbjörn Appehl
Original Message:
Sent: Fri October 30, 2020 07:44 AM
From: Liam Allan
Subject: Node.js on IBM i
Thought I'd try and start some discussion.
Who is using Node.js on IBM i? And what are you doing with it?
For me, I am constant user of it. Connecting to Db2 for i, calling RPGLE programs, generating documents.. all regular stuff. Also working on a pure JavaScript database driver, but that is taking some time.
How about you?