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

[David Goodwin]

In article <k6cofp$f3d$1 at solani.org>, M.Kraemer at gsi.de says...
> 
> 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.

Of course OS/2 was actually a joint project between IBM and Microsoft 
(There were several versions of "Microsoft OS/2", v1.3 being the last 
IIRC). 

Windows NT was originally going to be the next version of OS/2 until 
Windows 3.x took off and Microsoft decided to change direction. I think 
its OS/2 environment subsystem survived until Windows XP (NT 5.1).

So of course for IBM to open-source OS/2 they'd have to get Microsoft to 
agree as well.

I expect it would be a lot easier for HP to open-source OpenVMS. 
Anything important was probably written by DEC or has been open-sourced 
by third-parties already (eg, CDE+Motif).