[Info-vax] VLF: The 35th Anniversary Communique from the VMS Liberation Front

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:

> What would it take for HP to opensource VMS ?  Since they have already
> written off BCS and dwindled development to a bare minimum, would HP
> really lose anything by opensourcing VMS ? 

It may well be that they don't own all of the IP hidden in VMS.
Remember that IBM has refused several times to opensource OS/2,
for exactly that reason.
For software as complex as those OSs it would take a significant
effort to disentangle potential third party contributions. There's
little incentive to do so for OSs close to or beyond EOL.
As for HP and the few greenhorns nowadays maintaining VMS,
there's probably not much knowledge left to do the job.

> And opensourcing VMS would not accelerate the churn, if at all, it might
> reduce it.

Given the way opensource development works these days,
it probably would go the way of OpenSolaris or OpenOffice.
Or, even more probable, nobody would care, because the task
is just too big.