[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> wrote:
(snip)
> Someone has kindly contacted me offline with this information:

> "it was revealed some years ago (at a DECUS symposium I believe) that
> VMS engineering had arranged to code at least one utility that was part 
> of VMS in every language available for the system. This was intended to
> guarantee that the runtimes for every language would have to be included 
> with VMS.

Also, VAX (I believe VAX, and not VMS) included a common calling
convention so that it would be easier for one language to call
routines in another. That should reduce the need for so many
different runtimes, though there are likely language specific
parts.

> You may remember that many years back, some vendors were charging 
> separately for language runtimes, so you could write programs in a 
> language, but to distribute them usefully to others you had to pay toll 
> to the vendors. This was a method which ensured that such a thing could 
> not happen with VMS."

In addition, there is the client license system of MS, such that
you have to have a separate license for each user of a program
on a server.

-- glen