IBM

I stocked up pretty well, downloading and burning to DVDs mostly all the available stuff from 4.3.3 to 7.1. I might consider uploading a torrent in the distant future, should the desire arise.

Agree. IBM doesn't care, since nobody runs AIX except on enterprise equipment on contract. Same thing with Oracle, nobody runs SPARC servers except for enterprise customers on contracts.

It does suck that we the hobbyists who have POWER or SPARC hardware are getting screwed from all angles, but it doesn't affect IBM or Oracle business. As far as they know we simply don't exist.

I'd imagine that given the economic situation there are probably a number of smaller companies who have AIX boxes to run some software, perhaps not mission-critical but something old that they still need, who are looking for ways to minimize recurring expenses. Of course, IBM obsoleting newer "old hardware" might render this a non-issue, since there's no point in paying for support that IBM will not provide.

I also heard that in the HP case it was done because there were companies offering HP-UX support who were cheaper and offered better service than HP, so HP is trying to choke them out. Now IBM support is (or at least was) top notch, so that might not be an issue.

Besides - figure that if 10 people/companies/whatever pick up service contracts or maintain service contracts that they would have otherwise let lapse IBM has probably "made money from the switch".

The warehouse where I got my 7028 for free has been using AIX for some 15+ years. They upgrade their servers every 5 years or so, so technically they have that "support contract". Just an example of a non-enterprise company that uses IBM and AIX.

BTW, I uploaded the updates for 4.3.3 and 5L.

They may be "non-enterprise," but they're paying IBM, so IBM's happy. IBM sales is much smarter than SGI's salesforce from the '90s - they're happy to sell to anyone ready to give them money, rather than saying "You want to buy two?? Stop bothering us and come back when you're ready to buy 100."

Also, it looks like the downloads are still accessible. I just tried and it works. I also dled some Java6 and rpm.rte packages. All I had to do is log in. This isn't to say that they won't cut off the downloads completely at some point.

I wish I had a POWER4 at least so I can do AIX 6.1 or AIX 7.1 as 5.3 is running out of service soon. Oh well.