>>IBM made them go retrieve every?single tape and destroy it, and promise to
>>never again distribute it, in exchange for not being sued.
>This is something I can't really understand, it
>looks more like ... what the word in english? ... stubborness?
>obstinacy? ... than a real legal issue.
>Maybe IBM may have changed its mind?
I doubt if IBM could have sued RAND successfully. Back then, the arguments were about look and feel, and trying to patent a programming language would fail as it would be deemed a mere mathematical formula. Now, good-cop-bad-cop, IBM could have suggested that an operation busy modifying MVT might want to keep in good graces for the times it needed to call for support or such. IBM has good reasons not to have PL/S or a workalike out in the wild.
It looks like someone could start with PL360 and the available documentation and if it took three programmers for RAND to bring RL/S to production, how long would it take one programmer?
As for as Metal C as it applies to MVS, a GCC library could invoke the SVCs seamlessly, if someone wants to do the work and if anyone would use it.
