[Info-vax] Looking to find a way to pull all the Open Source / Freeware folks together

[Arne Vajhøj]

Bill Pedersen wrote:
> Over the past few months I have been working on developing momentum within
> the OpenVMS Community.  As a part of this process I have decided the first
> item to look to accomplish is to get focus on Open Source and Freeware
> within the Community.
> 
> As an example is Steven Schweda's recent quest for MMK sources.  Thanks to
> Ian for pointing out that it is at least currently linked to by the Kednos
> site.
> 
> I would like to think we can put more consistancy and effort into making
> central site of links and descriptions as well as some mechanism of
> information exchange.  I really have no axe to grind on how this is done but
> it seems like we have so much out there and there is no longer any single
> good resource for finding the information.
> 
> I would also like to think that placing a focus on Open Source and Freeware
> will help with the establishment of better communication between developers
> and maintainers and users so that we have the critical mass necessary to
> make sure we can work to establish some form of best practices or guidelines
> (As JF Mezei was recently seeking) so as to promote additional Open Source
> Projects targetted at OpenVMS.
> 
> I look forward to suggestions and participation from the members of
> comp.os.vms.

A new web site with "everything" would be fine. I would consider it
natural if HP hosted it and the "Freeware DVD" became a snapshot of
that.

But I don't think that download site or finding stuff is the real
problem. Except for real old stuff which has more historical interest
than actual usage interest.

The big problems are:
* people that are willing to spend the time it takes to port
   and maintain the port
* gettimg the ports into the official source code tree
* dependencies on build tools and/or libraries not available for
   VMS (that is obviously just a startup problem)

Arne