[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[David J Dachtera]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 
> In article <00220d0f$0$15048$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
>         JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> > yyyc186 wrote:
> >>  Let's look back to 9/11.  All
> >> of those companies running HP/UX, Windows, Linux and various Unix
> >> flavors in the Twin Towers.
> >
> >
> > Application availability trumps clustering capability. When the
> > application you need is discontinued from VMS, you have no choice but to
> >  move to another platform, even if its disaster recovery capabilities
> > are inferior but still acceptable.
> 
> And, as I have said in the past, all of this assumes someone actually
> wants these features.  Likeit or not, the majority of systems owners
> don't. 

...or do, but don't know it. "Marketing", remember? (VMS may have
forgotten, but no one else has.)

> I have personally looked into things like long-distance disk
> mirroring and it is really trivial to add to Unix.  Most of the needed
> code is already there.  But, guess what, I have yet to find anyone who
> actually sees enough value in it to ask for it. 

Like as not, they only need to be shown the way. Did you know you needed
a newsgroup interface before c.o.v. enetered your life?

> There may actually be
> people doing it but because the interest is so low it doesn't even make
> it onto the radar.  VMS has a lot of really nice features.  Unfortunately,
> some of them come with real and costly overhead and the number of people
> who are willing to accept that overhead is just too small.  People who
> don't need the feature are unwilling to accept the overhead.

Trouble is, of course, most of that cost is artificial. It exists
because bean-counters and other suits say it does. In reality, it
doesn't - as has been proven by the open source software movement.

D.J.D.