[Info-vax] Trying to build a case for Benefit of OpenVMS Hobbyist Program being beneficial to HP

[Craig A. Berry]

Bill Pedersen wrote:
> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS.  

It's rather sad that this is considered a matter of personal belief 
since the benefits are so numerous and so objectively obvious to anyone 
paying the slightest attention.

 > But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program.  My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community.  No guarantees, but I
> have to try.

Thanks for trying.  The return has to be measured in terms of 
capabilities and opportunities that would otherwise have been lost.

Where I work there are no system managers or even full-time OpenVMS 
people -- everyone's primary responsibilities lie elsewhere.  Yet about 
two years ago now we made the transition from Alpha to Itanium with no 
outside help and no significant problems.  I don't think that would've 
happened had I not had lots of prior experience installing, upgrading, 
and configuring my hobbyist systems, including an Integrity rx2600, 
which allowed me to learn the basics of the EFI console.

In fact, without the hobbyist program and my involvement in it, there's 
a good chance no one at my company would have even known there was this 
new thing called Itanium and that HP was making new hardware that would 
run OpenVMS.  Gosh knows it was impossible to buy HP hardware from HP 
even when we knew exactly what we wanted, but I digress.

I think it's highly probable that were there no hobbyist program, we 
would still be nursing along the old AlphaServer 2100 with fingers 
crossed until the end of time.  But since, thanks to the hobbyist 
program, I could run my own systems at home, I had been running them, 
and maintaining them, and paying attention to new developments.

I suspect there are many thousands of small VMS sites around the world 
that will never upgrade for the lack of one semi-knowledgeable person 
in-house who knows what's involved or at least where to go for help. 
The hobbyist program can be a very effective counter-measure, as my case 
  demonstrates.

> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported?  

There would be no Perl on OpenVMS without the hobbyist program.  I've 
been the primary maintainer of the VMS port for quite a few years, which 
means this includes the old 5.8.6 version HP still distributes as well 
as later versions (current is 5.14.2).

The record of what I've done is publicly available in Perl's version 
control system:

<http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=craigberry>

While I use Perl occasionally at work, I have no time to maintain it 
there, so this is all work I do on my own time and on my own (hobbyist) 
systems.

Aside from being ubiquitous and powerful and something that a lot of 
other software depends on, Perl is also extremely well-tested.  I do 
several builds a week of the latest development code, and each time I do 
I run the test suite, which has over 2,000 test scripts for a total of 
over 450,000 tests.  This has shaken out a number of bugs and 
limitations in the CRTL over the years.  If I remember correctly, it 
also exposed a system crashing bug in the first public beta of OpenVMS 
on Itanium.


I also maintain the VMS port of FreeTDS (<http://www.freetds.org/>), 
which is a client library supporting the tabular datastream protocol 
(TDS), which is what Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server talk on the wire.

The original port of FreeTDS was something I did as a hobbyist and as a 
bit of a curiosity.  Well, to be honest, it was more than curiosity; I 
had a premonition that we might get painted into a corner and I wanted 
to prepare for it, but I had no charter or work time to spend on it.

As time passed, the Sybase servers that our VMS system at work was 
talking to switched to Microsoft, and then Sybase discontinued VMS 
support, and then the Microsoft servers were being upgraded to a new 
version which changed the TDS protocol.

So my premonition came true.  Suddenly it was critical that we have 
drop-in replacements for the old Sybase clients that could talk the new 
version of the protocol and interact with the new Microsoft databases. 
I took off my hobbyist hat and we did a small emergency project to add 
VMS-style command syntax on top of the FreeTDS utilities I'd ported as a 
hobbyist; our problem was solved.  Eventually, after putting my hobbyist 
hat back on, I polished up that work and sent it back upstream so it's 
now available to everyone.

 > What utilities have you developed?  Where are they
> published?  

Perl and FreeTDS include OpenVMS build support in the standard source 
distributions.  Both of these projects have given me commit bits, 
meaning I can push my changes into the official repository without any 
begging or pleading.

I've also updated Joe Meadows' UAF utility and made it available here:

<http://code.google.com/p/jmuaf/>

> What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?

Hmm.  I downloaded and installed the GNV 3.0 beta kit.  I confess to not 
having done much with it after I discovered it includes only 16 updated 
utilities instead of the 96 new and updated utilities that were being 
promised for it a year ago.  It looks like if this vitally important bit 
of infrastructure is ever going to get the attention it needs and 
deserves, it's going to be done by hobbyists.

Sorry this got long.