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

[Bill Pedersen]

Craig A. Berry Wrote:
=========================
>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.
================================

Craig:

Thank you!

If you can provide more information please feel free.

Or drop me a note directly,

Bill.

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