[Info-vax] What is VMS worth?

[Subcommandante XDelta]

(WAS: Current VMS Usage Survey)

JF Mezei:
> On 13-12-03 21:24, Subcommandante XDelta wrote:
> 
>> Rather agreeing to sell VMS to a consortium composed of the remaining
>> 2000 paying customers, to preserve HPs reputation that they give a damn
>> about their business customers.
>
> What is left to sell ?
> 
> There is no engineering group. The value of VMS (or any OS) lies in the
> brains that have enough knowledge/experience to avoid pitfalls such as
> buffer overruns, create proper documentation etc. It is all gone.
> 
> And apart from restructuring teh source code to allow multi platform and
> ease porting, there hasn't been much development in VMS for about 15 years.
> 
> Also, remember that Digital donated much of the IP to Microsoft in
> exchange for the right to sell Windows.  HP ditched attekps to port the
> clustering stuff to HP-UX.
> 
> At this point in time, I would say that VMS has $0 residual value in
> terms of the OS itself. (support business might have some),
> 
> VMS is an antique OS that has been stagnant for many many years. Along
> the likes of Tru64, MPE, Data General's AOS/VS etc.

Bifurcate! - I decided to fork.

First, a joke from 2008:

Q: What is the capital of Iceland?

A: Reykjavik!

Wrong: It's two Krona.

What is the VMS human capital at HP? - John Egolf and Keith Parris, IIRC
- anybody else?

I do apologise to any of the Indians at VMS HQ, that may be reading
this, no doubt you are highly educated and highly talented, and you may
well have learned to love and respect the inherent quality of the VMS
way, but VMS Engineering you are not; however in a rebooted VMS ECOlogy
there will be demand for skilled VMS professionals.

What else?

A couple of Blu-ray sized backup media should cater for archiving image
backups of all the VMS build and test systems, and all the source code
to VMS and the layered products and documentation, both public and VMS
engineering internal.

Perhaps a shipping container worth of the paper documentation and
internal documentation from all the generations of VMS. The odd bit of
sentimental DEC hardware; and that's about it.

Possibly, perhaps, just tapping in the dark.

Of course there may be endless filing cabinets full of NDAs, but they
can all be rescinded, the paper contracts shredded, piled up, doused in
petrol and burned, the NDAs are not even worth recycling as toilet paper.

I had a bad dream a few nights ago, some sunset scenario, there was this
big funeral pyre of VMS manuals and reams and reams of LP 29 fan-fold
line-printer print-outs of all the VMS source code. Everthing stank of
petrol, there were HP and Microsoft suits all around, with champagne
bottles ready to pop and party streamers ready to pull.

Meg Whitman walks up the funeral pyre and with a nonchalant and
dismissive flick of the wrist throws a match onto the pyre and turns it
into a conflagration of cinders and ashes, no ceremony, no eulogy, no
witnessing, as soon as the match was cast, she turned away without a
backward glance and joined the throng of HP and MS suits, cheering in
celebration at the successful murder and annihilation of an operating
system culture, without penalty.

Microsoft finally killing the father through the Hewlett Packard proxy.

The intellectual heritage of the Digital Equipment Corporation lost to
humanity forever.

Extinguished, extirpated, exterminated, erased.

Luckily that was just a bad dream that I awoke out of, and I am sure I
am not typing this in a waking dream.

VMS is priceless, but what is it worth?

What is a fair price to offer HP for the full source code and
documentation, including all VMS engineering internal documentation and
images of the development and test systems?

Would anyone care to run some numbers?