OT: Retired projects from IBM alphaworks :-(

[Fernando Cassia-2]

[First, I apologize, but this is the only list I´m a member of with
the highest concentration of IBMers :)]

IBM Corp has the nasty habit of shuffling information around, and also
of removing good useful projects from its Alphaworks site. Case in
point, the useful "content modifying proxy" that used to be available
at

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/wbidk

And now displays "This technology has been retired. "

How much bandwidth would this have consumed to have it kept on-line,
even "as is"?

Funnily, the IBM Almaden labs page still keeps all the project info
and documentation on-line, except for the binaries....

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/wbi/doc/GettingStarted.html

... and looking at a download link from an archived version (2002) of
the alphaworks page shows a much nicer, shorter download URL
http://dl.alphaworks.ibm.com/technologies/wbidk/wbij45dk_2.zip&tech=wbidk
than the current crud of chained http post operations over SSL like
you´re downloading nuclear missile plans.... but the server gives a
"500 forbidden" error message which seems to indicate to me that the
files are still there, it´s just that they have revoked permission to
download them.

Of course, with the "modern" web site design one must pass through 2
pages of legalese, confirmations, checkbox clicks and whatnot to
download a simple file that years ago was a simple ftp:// download
from ftp.alphaworks.ibm.com.

In the words of Australian band Midnight Oil: "some say that´s
progress, I say that´s cruel..."

So, if any IBMer has any idea of where one could still get the elusive
wbij45dk_2.zip or wbij45dk_2.tar.gz
files, please let me know, either off-list or in this list.

TIA
FC
PS: In an ideal world, of course, IBM´s lawyers would just have an
horrible death.

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[Fernando Cassia-2]

"The Endicott team spent time thinking about the "business model":
How're we going to make money on this thing? They surveyed people on
whether they'd buy the history functionality for 30 bucks. Sort of.
But it didn't seem like that big a business, from IBM's point of view
anyway. And the thing is that WBI is more than a single plugin ---
more than history or traffic lights --- it is an architecture for
building intermediary applications.

IBM is a big company. It has hundreds of thousands of employees and
makes billions of dollars a year. It didn't get that big by taking
frivolous chances. We learned this firsthand as we could not convince
very many executives or others inside IBM that we had a really nice
scheme for programming web applications. It was particularly suited to
applications for which you don't have control of the data. We reasoned
that infrastructure and plumbing is IBM's bread and butter, so WBI
should be a natural. But alas, researchers' wild-eyed visions are not
always exactly in line with corporate business planners' bottom lines.
However, both species often live in a symbiotic relationship. "


http://replay.web.archive.org/20000817033456/http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/wbi/Story.html

And this, kids, is why any software product from IBM will ultimately
fail. Unless it costs $1M dollars or can be sold to Fortune 500 firms,
it will die of neglect, just like NetRexx

:-(
FC
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