[Info-vax] Thanks but no thanks!

[JF Mezei]

Mark Daniel wrote:

> For open source, the major hurdle for VMS is its minute market share and 
> correspondingly proportioned user community.  There's little or no 
> critical mass to make open source work well

There are big efforts made by the community. Mr SMS does the ZIP port
and maintenance for instance. There are the maintainers of the WASD and
OSU web servers etc etc.

Consider the efforts and amount of middleware required to compile
Seamonkey/Firefox on VMS.  One needs to have a whole slew of up to date
tools to compile the up to date version of open source software. Not an
easy task to compile modern "open source" stuff. It isn't just a matter
of dong a "CC" of a couple of files.


And from an "outlook" point of view, the image of VMS is that of a
dwindling community with some suspicion that HP/Intel will announce the
end of Itanium and implicit end of VMS "soon". The lack of VMS marketing
 furthers this suspicion.

Since most shops have long ago deployed Unix (or, shudder, Windows)
environments alongside their legacy VMS boxes, when there is a need for
an open source tool, it is far easier to deploy it on the Unix
infrastructure than to go through the trouble of porting it to VMS.


VMS may have been a versatile multi purpose environment in the past, but
it has been relegated to some back office server engine. In many ways,
it has become similar to what Tandem has always been. Some box dedicated
to a few specific tasks.