About the Legacy Guild - Who We Are
The Legacy Guild is a Public Service Project of American Flier, Inc. (AFI), an Indiana Subchapter S Corporation. The Legacy Guild is NOT a 501c3 or 501c4 non-profit.
Thus, the Legacy Guild is really just its website Legacy Guild, as a service of AFI. In this larger sense, the Legacy Guild is the collection of all who care to participate in it.
Why would we choose the name Legacy Guild? Let's look for a straightforward answer from Websters:
Legacy (noun) - something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.
Guild (noun) - an organized group of people who have joined together because they share the same job or interest; especially an association of craftsmen or merchants who made or sold goods in the Middle Ages.
So the Legacy Guild is a group of people, organized around a website, who share an interest in the craft of Information Technology, and specifically in those information systems, which we call Legacy Systems, that have shown a particular longevity and whose care has been passed to us. The Legacy Guild may not be composed of many members who did original work on Legacy Systems, though there might be some. Much more frequently, Legacy Guild members are active stewards, who have been entrusted to care and support these systems long after original developers have departed.
Understanding the Mission of the Legacy Guild, to be the active stewards of what has been entrusted to us, which is to support and preserve these systems to the best of our abilities, we seek people of all roles to contribute to the common goal, namely, IBM mainframe Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) experts for modernization projects, but also, journeymen developers, project managers, IBM mainframe support, development environment hosting, application subject matter experts, and second tier contracting firms interested in participating.
Everyone participates as much or as little as they like. One of our goals is to procure a properly licensed "IBM mainframe on a PC" so that Legacy Guild members might enter into contractual relationships with each other to develop maintenance and/or modernization frameworks for legacy systems that can be applied to production mainframe installations. If you are looking to get some IBM mainframe experience, consider this an (eventual) opportunity for some inexpensive training, with a real line item you can put on your resume.
If any legacy mainframe hourly opportunities cross our site, we will put them up for all to see. Beyond that, we will also endeavor to create Legacy Guild Teams to seek entire modernization or maintenance contracts for end clients. The hourly opportunities will be put forth in the Job Opportunities area of the website; project opportunities will be put forth in the Project Opportunities area.
Thus, the Legacy Guild is really just its website Legacy Guild, as a service of AFI. In this larger sense, the Legacy Guild is the collection of all who care to participate in it.
Why would we choose the name Legacy Guild? Let's look for a straightforward answer from Websters:
Legacy (noun) - something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.
Guild (noun) - an organized group of people who have joined together because they share the same job or interest; especially an association of craftsmen or merchants who made or sold goods in the Middle Ages.
So the Legacy Guild is a group of people, organized around a website, who share an interest in the craft of Information Technology, and specifically in those information systems, which we call Legacy Systems, that have shown a particular longevity and whose care has been passed to us. The Legacy Guild may not be composed of many members who did original work on Legacy Systems, though there might be some. Much more frequently, Legacy Guild members are active stewards, who have been entrusted to care and support these systems long after original developers have departed.
Understanding the Mission of the Legacy Guild, to be the active stewards of what has been entrusted to us, which is to support and preserve these systems to the best of our abilities, we seek people of all roles to contribute to the common goal, namely, IBM mainframe Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) experts for modernization projects, but also, journeymen developers, project managers, IBM mainframe support, development environment hosting, application subject matter experts, and second tier contracting firms interested in participating.
Everyone participates as much or as little as they like. One of our goals is to procure a properly licensed "IBM mainframe on a PC" so that Legacy Guild members might enter into contractual relationships with each other to develop maintenance and/or modernization frameworks for legacy systems that can be applied to production mainframe installations. If you are looking to get some IBM mainframe experience, consider this an (eventual) opportunity for some inexpensive training, with a real line item you can put on your resume.
If any legacy mainframe hourly opportunities cross our site, we will put them up for all to see. Beyond that, we will also endeavor to create Legacy Guild Teams to seek entire modernization or maintenance contracts for end clients. The hourly opportunities will be put forth in the Job Opportunities area of the website; project opportunities will be put forth in the Project Opportunities area.
Our competitive edge in eventually turning this into something that *will* pay off with projects is this - if the modernization is full scale, without using SOA recycling of existing CICS transactions as the services, the so-called "modernization" costs approach just as much as a total rewrite of these big legacy systems. And for financial systems on the order of a few million lines of code, that means maybe $50 million -$100 million a pop. With SOA, we will, I believe, be able to modernize systems, web-enabling them, maybe even pulling them into Business Process Modeling frameworks, for maybe 10 - 30% of the cost of an expensive rewrite.
Any "framework" development will not be an Open Source or Free Software Foundation type project. It is a "sweat equity" pull ourselves up by our bootstraps project organized in teams of members themselves. How we handle any pilot/prototype software we develop remains to be seen, and we will probably have to discuss in our Forums.
For any such project to be successful, we will need IBM z/os experts, CICS experts, DB2 database admins, journeymen CoBOL/CICS coders, journeymen CoBOL coders eager to learn IBM mainframe skills, providers of IBM mainframe hosting services (needed for development of a pilot or prototype to demo at conferences), some technical/proposal writers, and some project manager types. These are the skills that we need to pull this off.
Our contributors are far flung geographically, so that means telecommuting toward an effort is not only acceptable, but for some of us will be downright necessary. We will do our utmost to work that into any project work plan structure.
Any "framework" development will not be an Open Source or Free Software Foundation type project. It is a "sweat equity" pull ourselves up by our bootstraps project organized in teams of members themselves. How we handle any pilot/prototype software we develop remains to be seen, and we will probably have to discuss in our Forums.
For any such project to be successful, we will need IBM z/os experts, CICS experts, DB2 database admins, journeymen CoBOL/CICS coders, journeymen CoBOL coders eager to learn IBM mainframe skills, providers of IBM mainframe hosting services (needed for development of a pilot or prototype to demo at conferences), some technical/proposal writers, and some project manager types. These are the skills that we need to pull this off.
Our contributors are far flung geographically, so that means telecommuting toward an effort is not only acceptable, but for some of us will be downright necessary. We will do our utmost to work that into any project work plan structure.