[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Apr 22, 11:42 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > Even if it were given to them for free, Oracle would have to build the
> > support teams, and build up VMS engineering to give it a big development
> > boost to bring it into the 21st century, port it to a modern platform
> > etc. Huge investment.
>
> HP is letting this business die on the vine. If Oracle bought OpenVMS
> they would also take the HP employees supporting OpenVMS (remember
> Alphacide? Intel scooped up the the best of the Alpha engineers)
>
>
>
> > If Oracle lets HP downsize VMS out of existence, then Oracle can offer
> > sweet deals to RDB customers to migrate over to Oracle on Solaris. This
> > would likely be much cheaper and profitable for Oracle than to keep
> > developping VMS/RDB along with Oracle/Solaris.
>
> > Sun was quite smart to keep developping Solaris on 8086 because it was
> > great insurance against rumours of Sparc's demise. And from Oracle's
> > point of view, it gives them the option to continue Sparc or end Sparc
> > and focus on the 8086 at very little cost.
>
> Intel made deals with Compaq to kill Alpha. They might make deals with
> Oracle to kill SPARC. If any of these deals involve cash, those assets
> could be used to build/rebuild an OpenVMS support group. They already
> have enough money to pay for a port to x86-64
>
> Neil Rieck
> Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
> Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/

Not disagreeing with most of what you say, but...

I was under the impression that the SPARC architecture had been owned
by SPARC International for a number of years, and that they were an
"independent" company. Is that not correct? If so, how is SPARC
affected directly by its former owner being under new management? It
may affect the size of its potential market, obviously...

The other thing to note is that at least one reasonably recent SPARC
chip design is released under GPL, so as with MySQL, there's nothing
much Oracle can do about it directly.