[Info-vax] OpenVMS.Org quick pool

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2012-08-21 13:50:21 +0000, Bob Koehler said:

> In article <g17cg9-03k2.ln1 at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture 
> <nospam at sture.ch> writes:
>> 
>> I would call it unfortunate rather than stupid.  I am sure there were
>> corners of code best left behind in getting a port out on time and on
>> budget.
> 
>    The kind of short-term, bottom-line thinking that's been sinking
>    companies forever.

Short-term and bottom-line thinking can go either way, with these decisions.

Failing to address issues such as time-to-market?
Failing to retire the less-profitable stuff earlier rather than later, 
and to transfer those savings on more profitable lines of development 
more quickly?
Failing to have new and innovative products to cannibalize your 
existing products?
Failing to deprecate products and features that are an impediment for 
new development work?
Failing to account for the costs of maintaining compatibility?  (Make 
no mistake, compatibility has a cost, and it increases over time.)

In open-source terms, VMS was forked when support for portability and 
for Alpha was added, and the 64-bit source pools quickly became the 
mainline.

There were a number of factors involved in the decision to fork the 
source pools, and time-to-market was definitely one of them.  That 
Alpha was the path forward for VMS.  There were a number of other 
considerations obviously, and some of those other considerations didn't 
get resolved until probably six or eight years after the Alpha port was 
started, too.

For customers that weren't moving to Alpha (and for whatever reason) 
the "non-portable" VMS sources and the VAX platform would be maintained 
for both user-mode and kernel-mode API stability, as was announced 
around the release of OpenVMS VAX V6.0 release.  And the folks on VAX 
have now had ~twenty years of support, too.

Regardless, the source pool fork happened, and I can't fathom any 
reason why VAX would ever be returned to the forefront.

If you're running a business now (or considering your own career, for 
that matter) , you want to spend more time considering where you want 
to be ~2017 or maybe in ~2022, and what you'll need to do new and what 
you'll need to deprecate to get there.  Considering what happened or 
might have happened in ~1992 can be interesting, but that competitive 
environment and the markets for those ~1992 products are gone.



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