[Info-vax] Happy new Year !

[JF Mezei]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> The decline in VMS usage will not stop just because we pretend that
> it does not happen.

2009 was the year when I think it became very evident to most that HP
had no intentions of giving VMS a "renaissance". With Sue and the rest
of VMS engineering gone, VMS is now a faceless product.

There is no point in noticing Livermore speeches where she mentiones
development for HP=UX and NSK, but mentions "ensure we support our
installed base of openVMS customers" separately.

The message has been sent loud and clear in 2009.


> There are many reasons why it is as it is. The market changed.

I disagree quite a bit with this. Other operating systems are thriving
in a changing market, including various forms of Unix. Consider how
FreeBSD has evolved into OS-X. Consider Linux.  Evolution of old systems
is very possible. Heck, at the risk of causing an increase in VAXman's
blood pressure, even Windows has evolved significantly from its DOS/3.1
days.

VMS has gone down because it was not given the resources to keep up with
the Jones'.  False arguments that "customers don't need those features"
were bandied about as *excuses* for not adding the modern features that
modern customers need.

Porting Mozilla was a ray of hope, but it was short lived because this
required too many resources to keep all of the middleware needed for
Mozilla up to date. (I think Hoff or FredK once listed all of the
software needed just to compile the beast).

Guess what, if they can do this on Linux, they should be able to do this
on VMS. If they can do this on OS-X, they could do this on VMS. But you
need commitment and budgets to get it done.

Apple nearly died because it got stuck on MacOS and failed to upgrade it
quickly enough. Digital died because it didn't upgrade VMS.

And in the end, if HP were to pull the plug on VMS today, it would still
show the relilience of VMS, having outlasted 2 companies (DEC and
Compaq) and more importantly, having survived 15 years of constant
attempts to kill it (both by the owners and by the press who reflected
the owner's actions/inactions on VMS).

And even if HP were to kill VMS  today, VMS would still have many
useful features that others don't have. Not just clustering, but also
simple stuff like OPCOM, good sturdy security you can trust (except for
pop/imap/xdm), and system management that gives you a really good feel
for your system, who is running what, how many resources they are using
(and ability to limit how many resources any one process can use).

It is a shame that VMS is a great cake, but it just lacks the icing.
Other OS have great icing, but have terrible cake.


My prediction is that VMS will continue to be "developped" until the
death of IA64 is formally announced sometime in the next 2 years at
which point both IA64 and VMS will get one more iteration before going
on 5 year support. However, if death of IA64 is announced before 8.4 is
out, then 8.4 will be the last version.