Talk:Hercules (emulator)

Public Domain?
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)


 * 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)


 * I changed VM/CMS to VM/370. Jay Maynard 15:17, 12 November 2006 (UTC)


 * 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)


 * 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)


 * 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)


 * 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)


 * 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)

Insufficient context?
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)

On 3 September 2007 I added some context and removed the lack-of-context tag -- Roger Bowler 05:38, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Hercules-logo.gif
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BetacommandBot (talk) 17:45, 2 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Fair use rationale added. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 15:51, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Missing Screenshot in Example Usage?
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)

Image:HerculesCaptureDEcran-HMC.gif ? Rbowler 20:26, 7 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roger Bowler (talk • contribs)

Paragraph about MVS/380 is inappropriate
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)

I replaced the paragraph about MVS/380 as I indicated above. I retained the references to the two relevant yahoo groups, although I am in doubt as to whether these references are actually appropriate, because External_links item 10 of the section "Links normally to be avoided" lists yahoo groups as inappropriate for external links. However, further down in the section "References and citation" it states that "Sites that have been used as sources in the creation of an article should be cited in the article, and linked as references ... Links to these source sites are not "external links" for the purposes of this guideline". These two yahoo groups are the only real sources I could find to justify my assertion that "there are at least two projects underway...". Perhaps the paucity of sources suggests that MVS/380 fails the notability criterion and so this whole sentence or paragraph ought to be deleted? I leave that to a neutral editor to decide -- Roger Bowler 22:27, 7 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rbowler (talk • contribs)

So-called "free software"
The Hercules development community generally objects to the term "free software", and in several instances contributes to Hercules specifically as a reaction to the misuse of the term. As long as the portal and the categories use this misleading term to apply to software that is freely available and redistributable, please do not add Hercules to them, since it implies support for the "free software" side of the ongoing political war that does not, in fact, exist. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 08:57, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It does not matter what the Hercules project considers or thinks about itself, Wikipedia is about facts, not opinions. Fact is Hercules is licensed under QPL which is a free software license, hence Hercules is free software. Its like if Usama bin Laden replaced the word 'terrorist' with 'freedom fighter' in the article about him. Frap (talk) 13:18, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
 * "Free software" advocates complain mightily when open source advocates say that "free software" is a subset of open source software, and therefore a part of that movement. Why is it, then, that "free software" advocates insist on co-opting open source software when the reverse objection is made?
 * The portal is taking a side in the war, which is itself a violation of NPOV. So is calling Hercules "free software". When the portal becomes agnostic in the "free software"/open source debate, then Hercules will gladly join it. Until then, adding Hercules to the portal, or listing it in a "free software" category, implies that the Hercules developers endorse a position which they emphatically do not. Please do not put those words in our mouths. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 15:33, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Open source is a software development method, free software is a social movement. Nobody is claiming you say that Hercules is free software. But Hercules is, as per Frap above said. So please stop pushing your point of view on Wikipedia. Palosirkka (talk) 08:15, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * The article takes no position in the "open source"/"free software" war, because it used neither term until you added it. I'm not pushing a POV here; you are. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 08:21, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Fairly funny statement. I can find 4 instances of "open source" on the page and zero "free software" prior to my edit. If anything, I'm balancing the equation. You don't seem to like it. Palosirkka (talk) 08:30, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Can you? Please feel free to remove them in the name of NPOV. But don't shanghai us to your social movement after we've asked you not to, and after others have agreed...and that you call it a social movement itself is an admission of a POV, since that's what social movements *do*: push POVs. The solution to a non-NPOV statement isn't pushing the opposing POV, but removing the non-NPOV wording in the first place. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 08:44, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Please, folks, before you do this, remember that this has been discussed at the dispute resolution noticeboard, and the resolution was to not include it in "free software". -- Jay Maynard (talk) 14:48, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Articles of faith
"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)


 * 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)

I will gladly put it back if you can find a benchmark that compares a production z/OS workload running on a z114 with the same workload running on Hercules on a high-end Intel server. Roger Bowler 06:27, 11 April 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rbowler (talk • contribs)

SLES most popular?
"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)

Declaration of interest
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)

About "free" and "open source" categories
I'm afraid the noticeboard thread was perhaps closed a bit too early; I'm afraid we will have to continue this a bit. I've so far seen two sets of arguments against the "free software" cat: (a) the ideological/political issue, i.e. the project itself sees a difference between the two concepts on political grounds, and prefers not to be associated with the term (that seems to be J. Maynard's main argument); (b) the technical issue, i.e. the QPL is technically not a "free" but an "open source" license according the the precise definitions of these terms (Hasteur's argument). Now, about argument (a), I'm afraid I agree with those editors above who have said that we should ignore it; that's just not the kind of criterion we use here. About (b), I must say I'm not quite seeing it: if for "free software" we use the definition given by the Free Software Foundation itself, then apparently the QPL in fact is accepted as "free", or if it isn't I haven't yet seen which precise condition of which authoritative definition of a "free license" it fails to meet.

Finally, in terms of Wikipedia categorizing policies, it turns out that the Wikipedia community, for better or worse, has repeatedly rejected the suggestion that we should divide the relevant categorization trees up into one for "free" software and one for "open source" software. The last time this consensus was reached was at a CFD discussion over Category:Open source software in 2007, apparently (Categories for discussion/Log/2007 September 17), where it was decided to merge the "open source" cats into the "free" cats. Similarly, an older category Category:Open source had also been merged earlier. This is why both categories Category:Open Source software and Category:Open source software have been empty redirects or mere redlinks for a long while. (To be exact, there was one article in each of them yesterday, but apparently by mistake; both articles in question were about software that was licensed under the GPL, so the choice was unlikely to be motivated by any principled objection like here.) All other articles involving the QPL, including the QPL article itself and articles on other software projects under the same license, are also in the "free" cats.

The Wikipedia community has decided it wants to treat both these flavours of FOSS software under the same category tree, and I think this is entirely reasonable in terms of aiding readers to navigate through the cats. I can understand why some people may be unhappy with the choice of the one term over the other, but I think it would be a very bad idea to rip the categories apart into two parallel trees again. Needless to say, having no category at all is not a solution either. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:15, 31 August 2011 (UTC)


 * That's the kind of discussion I was hoping to have over at DRN. Unfortunately, it looks to me like Wikipedia has come down on the "free software" side of the argument; that's POV-pushing, but since it appears all of Wikipedia agrees that's the POV to push, I guess we're stuck with it. No matter how much you try to ignore it, though, you will be seen as pushing the "free software" POV merely by using the term, and you will continue to put words into the mouths of developers who do not agree with the "free software"agenda by applying the term where it is not wanted.


 * I agree that the users would be ill served by a bifurcation. I guess I was hoping for a term that does not push either POV. It doesn't appear that one is forthcoming.


 * This resolution does not make me happy at all. I suspect the answer is to publish a paper at the Hercules site about why we do not consider it "free software" and do not consider ourselves part of the social movement that has "free software" at its center, and then hope some kindly editor would point it out in the article. I won't do that myself, just to avoid the COI issues it would bring, and would discourage anyone else associated with the Hercules project from doing so. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 18:46, 31 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Actually, the existence of reliable sources which make that point would be a good way to resolve this. Nevertheless, this isn't "Wikipedia choosing a side" so much as a procedural matter dating back to the category merge; ideally the category would have been renamed with a compromise title at that time, but there's no reason that discussion can't happen in future. FWIW I reckon this was a bit of a storm in a teacup. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 12:57, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

What did TurboHercules want from IBM?
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)


 * 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)


 * Aha. thanks. Gronky (talk) 20:38, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * 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)

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