[Info-vax] VMS83A_UPDATE V11

[Simon Clubley]

On 2009-12-12, FrankS <sapienza at noesys.com> wrote:
> On Dec 11, 8:37 pm, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-
> Earth.UFP> wrote:
>
>> Personal experience: I currently trust my Linux patches much more
>> than I trust the current VMS patches.
>
> Well goody for you.  I'm not sure what the basis is for your lack of
> trust in OpenVMS patches .vs. Linux patches.  Is this a new opinion
> due to the transfer of development to India?  Or is there some other
> underlying distrust in developers being paid by a commercial
> entity .vs. volunteer developers?
>

No, it's due to the number of VMS patches been withdrawn or having
documented problems over the last few months versus the number of
problems I've seen when using Linux patches.

> I'm not a Linux person, so pardon my ignorance.  I would think that
> Linux patches are less trustworthy, given their open-source nature.
> Who vets a patch to make sure it doesn't introduce a back-door
> security breach, written by some mischievous "community" member?  What
> is the experience level of volunteers contributing to the Linux code
> base compared with those developing OpenVMS patches?
>

I use Red Hat based systems so the trust issues are comparable to those
for VMS systems. I would also ask how do you know that a backdoor hasn't
been placed into VMS at the request of, say, the US government ?

> I was told by others that a recent release of Ubuntu has broken
> systems using an Nvidia video card.  So far no relief (which means
> lots of dead systems), and who do you complain to when that happens?

There are commercial Linux companies (ie: Red Hat), so you can support
your systems in the same way as you can with VMS if you need that
level of support.

Also, even before the current VMS structure was in place, I have
personally had problems with the amount of time it took for VMS support
to produce a fix for some problems.

One final note: A review of my postings over the last few years will
show that I like VMS _a lot_. However, I'm not about to stick my head in
the sand and pretend that there are no problems when the problems
clearly exist.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980's technology to a 21st century world