IBM's CGIDEV2 is on an accelerated collision course with destiny, sparked by the June retirement of its biggest champion, former IBMer Giovanni Perotti.
Perotti, as you may or may not know, was steward of IBM's Easy400 Web site, which provides free downloads of tools for building Web applications on your AS/400. The core of the site is CGIDEV2. But let's take it back a step.
A guy named Mel Rothman developed CGIDEV back in 1996, then enhanced it in 1999 to CGIDEV2. Perotti created the IBM Easy400 mini Web site and convinced management at the IBM Rochester Custom Technology Center to let him distribute CGIDEV2 for free.
Thousands of AS/400 developers downloaded CGIDEV2 and began building Web applications on their AS/400s, often supporting one another via the Easy400Group on Yahoo! Groups. Perotti estimates there are 17,000 Easy400 subscribers around the world, coming from 126 countries. About 7,000 are from the United States and 4,000 from Italy. 'My educated estimate,' Perotti says, 'is that at least 3,000 of them have created Web sites on the AS/400 or iSeries using CGIDEV2
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Not likely to disappear, but may fade away unless IBM permits it to develop either under their banner or as open source agreement. Shame on IBM for allowing users to believe that it was open source and then changing their minds!
ReplyDeletemartin