[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Apr 25, 4:13 pm, ChrisQ <blackh... at devnull.com> wrote:
> Bob Koehler wrote:
> > In article <0036b65c$0$30964$c3e8... at news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> writes:
> >> When Sun changed the pricing to Solaris (to $0), did that greatly reduce
> >> the TCO of Solaris/Sparc solutions, or did it just shift costs to
> >> support and TCO remains 10 times higher than for Linux ?
>
> >    Initial cost of ownership for Sun is still higher than Linux.  A lot
> >    of folks are in charge of project development and will look only at
> >    development cost and not TCO.
>
> Please elaborate - it may have been true in the days when Sun charged
> for Solaris, but now that it's open source, the only thing remaining is
> the support cost. I would think that is fairly similar, as it's
> primarily labour intensive. Both install fairly easily and at least
> solaris recognises the video card transparently. More than can be said
> for Suse 10.? which I recently had a look at. Came up after install at
> vga 640x480 and needed quite a bit of fiddling to get a sane resolution.
>
> It's stuff like that gives linux the slightly hacker feel, to which you
> can add the over blown and un neccessary desktop decoration and other
> gimmicks, which you have to (again) spend time turning off. Solaris just
> comes up with cde, whatever and you never have to frig about with it
> again. I want to *use* an os to do real work and not have to delve into
> the depths to make stuff work, other than out of interest.
>
>
>
> >    This may not be good strategic planning, but it is real.  And I've
> >    seen no string evidence that Sun has a lower TCO than Linux these
> >    days.
>
> An old friend of mine recently told me that they paid red hat over 750k
> uk pounds (~$10e6) for support last year. Mind you, they do have over
> 200 Tbytes online over dozens of dl380 etc servers. On balance, I think
> the reason linux became popular was because it was free to use, a unix
> lookalike that ran Apache. Critically, it's reputation had matured to
> the point that it was seen as being robust enough and the install
> process became automated and simple enough for medium level competence
> admins to do the work. What everyone forgets, of course, is that linux
> is just as complex as any other unix under the hood, so when something
> breaks, it needs the same level of competence to fix it.
>
> What linux doesn't have, is the holistic (if I can use such a word :-)
> oneness of an os that has been developed under the gaze of the same team
> ethos for decades, ie: vms as it was, solaris, irix, etc. Os's that used
> to be described as industrial strength, designed from the ground up from
> software engineering principles so that all the bits fit together with
> no gaps. If bits come from everywhere, how do you test the whole and who
> handles and controls regression testing when changes are made ?. All
> that can be said about linux is that it doesn't seem to fall over, but
> where is the data to support a given confidence level ?.
>
> One point that no one has touched on thus far is the benefit of running
> on non x86 hardware. While it would only be part of an overall security
> strategy, the fact that intel binaries won't run on the hardware could
> be a significant benefit in terms of virus resistance. Just one more
> reason why the diminishing pool of architectures is a bad thing.
>
> To get back on topic, I can't think of any reason at all why oracle
> would want to buy vms. Hardly any modern software runs on it anymore, no
> one knows how to admin it and it only runs on one current architecture.
> As for security, the rest of the world has probably caught up.
>
> I think they got a bargain...
>
> Regards,
>
> Chris

Although I agree with much of what you say, I'd like to add a few
comments.

1) SuSe 10

Suse 10.whatever is ancient history (11.1 is out now). How old was the
PC, or the graphics card?

2) "Oneness"

Indeed. But one of the things I like about SuSe (vs other Linuxes I
have tried, from RedHat 4 via Mandrake to Ubuntu and maybe others
along the way) is that SuSe do at least make some attempt to "unify"
things. You can't change too much or it wouldn't be Linux, but
(whisper it quietly) SuSe Linux came with **manuals**. If you wanted,
you could even get proper printed harcopy manuals (user guide and
admin guide) that actually related to the version of the OS you were
using, rather than online Howtos for some previous version with
unspecified differences. You shouldn't be comparing SuSe's lack of
"oneness" with VMS, you should be comparing it with Windows, those two
potentially address the same market. When did Windows last come with
manuals? What sense of "oneness" do any Microsoft products have?

3) Non-x86 platforms as a virus blocker

Careful. The term "virus" is (ab)used to cover a lot of different
kinds of exploit these days, and not all of them rely on running a bit
of x86-native code.