[aus_]

You are preaching to the choir! I am not an IBMer, so I have the same gripes.

Mainframes gradually exited academia in the mid-80s. It was a terrible mistake by IBM, because they essentially eliminated the next generation of mainframers. They've since come to their senses with a program called the IBM Academic Initiative [0] which promotes the use of mainframes in Computer Science courses. It's only about 20 years too late.

But I think they could do a better job. Up until recently, the only way to try z/OS without accessing million dollar hardware was to break the law. You literally had to torrent a pirated copy of z/OS. And it's not easy to find. A few years ago, IBM changed this with their tool: Rational Developer and Test for System z [1]. It's essentially Hercules but you get a legal copy of z/OS. And it's $9500 per year per CPU. And there is some stupid hardware license usb key.

And regarding your questions, your points are valid. Vendor lock-in is a concern. IBM is the only player in the business, and they know it. But look at every major industry that's been around at least 30 years: all the mission critical stuff runs on a mainframe. Maybe it's because it's the only thing that runs their legacy COBOL code. But it works and it's rock solid.

The poster child of migrating to Linux on z is Nationwide. They successfully moved almost all of their x86 processing to Linux on z and saved a ton of money. There's the definitely-not-vendor-biased white paper out there. Do some googling on "Nationwide Linux on z".

[0]: http://www-304.ibm.com/ibm/university/academic/pub/page/acad... [1]: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ratideveandtesten...