[Info-vax] The Open-Sourcing Discussion, Yet Again

[JF Mezei]

On 13-12-11 08:50, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> From my own and potentially faulty memory, there never were very many 
> third-party pieces included within the base OS. 

The one piece that I know of was the DHCP server which came from a now
defunct company (forgot the name). The one on VMS is actually more
capable than then on on OS-X.

> OK, assuming and entirely hypothetically the source code is cleared and 
> then released for the moment.  Then what?  Updating OpenVMS to meet 
> what will likely be customer expectations, and porting OpenVMS to 
> x86-64 will be *large* projects with *many* engineers and *years* of 
> full-time work, and many of the existing OpenVMS customers probably 
> won't care and won't migrate.

No, the whole point of making VMS open source is to allow bits to be
ported to other operating systems. Consider for instance moving TPU to
OS-X/Linux.

It is not realistic to expect an open source community to fund the
porting of a dead operating system to a new platform, unless you can
convince a rich uncle such as Bill Gates, Larry Page/Sergei Brin to do so.

Since Apple is out of the serious use game and focusing only on mass
market, it would not see any use in taking on bits from VMS.


> Full disclosure: All of this is entirely HP's decision.  IANAL.  This 
> posting — like all of my postings — is from old and potentially very 
> faulty memory, contains guesses and the occasional stupid idea, and 
> there are probably errors here.

Hoff's guesses are better than statement of facts from others since you
were knee deep in all that stuff for so long. And since you are probably
the one who started the pilot/evaluation to port VMS to the 64 bit 8086
in ZKO's basement, you probably have a lot more knowledge than you are
allowed to reveal :-)