[Info-vax] Message from HP.

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 09:49:21 UTC, JF Mezei  wrote:
> On 13-12-10 21:10, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > Name one proprietary, commercial OS that has been released to the
> 
> > world in source?  No. CP/M doesn't meet that definition.
> 
> 
> 
> Palm OS (or whatever it was called), released to public domain after HP
> 
> abandonned plans to go mobile.
> 
> 
> 
> Also, Apple makes the "Darwin" Unix open source, it is a glorified
> 
> FreeBSD with lots of Apple add-ons (but without the apple gui).

And in the land of high availability systems, but as an addon rather than a 
complete OS, there was also Tandem/Locus's (and thus later Compaq's) NonStop 
Clusters for UNIXware. A "single system image" cluster product for x86, 
initially using ServerNet as the cluster interconnect. Compaq released it as 
open source, it became OpenSSI, and the story appears to have ended shortly 
after that. The legal mess around SCO and Caldera and what not can't have 
helped much either.

I never saw it in action, but on paper it looked quite interesting, and anyone 
wanting to look with fresh eyes at high availability Linux/x86 might want to 
make sure they have a quick look at what it tried to do (technically and 
commercially), how it tried to do it, and why it seems to have vanished.

Anyway, there's no way you could opensource OpenVMS. You'd have to rename it to 
OpenOpenVMS and that would be silly. Oh hang on, it wouldn't be any sillier 
than most other major HP decisions in recent years (and it certainly wouldn't 
be any sillier than those "IT professionals" who appear to think that Windows 
is the answer, now and forever, whatever the requirement is).