Tom Jarosh, the general manager of IBM Corp’s AS/400 server division, has hinted that his organization is working on a way of moving at least some of the application development for the AS/400 into the open source community. The AS/400 division is already working on an adaptation of the Apache Web server for the AS/400. Apache for the AS/400 has been in development for about a year and is as yet only available through special bid from IBM, but will be ready for a future release of the operating system and will eventually replace the integrated HTTP Server for AS/400s (formerly known as the Domino Go Web Server in OS/400 V4R1, which was originally called the Internet Connection Server in OS/400 V3R2, V3R6 and V3R7).
Jarosh is keeping very tight-lipped about his specific open source plans, but it seems unlikely that IBM, ever protective of its intellectual property, will release an open source implementation of OS/400 and its integrated DB2/400 relational data base management system. Jarosh’s organization could try to speed along the move from the AS/400’s proprietary RPG compilers to Java by giving out open source code for AS/400 shops to use for, say, e-business rather than developing their own in RPG. This would kill two birds with one stone, helping the AS/400 look open source and helping Java get more commercialized in the corporate data centers where the AS/400 prevails as the basic book-keeping box.
Alternatively, the AS/400 division could start melding open source tools and applications into OS/400 and even go as far as supporting Linux on the AS/400’s Integrated Netfinity Servers. Sendmail is an obvious piece of open source code that currently is not supported on the AS/400. But given IBM’s desire to sell Lotus Domino for messaging, it is hard to imagine IBM pushing the free Sendmail alternative – unless, of course, it intends to put Sendmail at the heart of Domino, as it will eventually do with the Apache Web server sometime in the future.
