[Info-vax] Access to HP OpenVMS Patches...

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <783a185f-9683-4ba2-825e-9cc1483bd165 at googlegroups.com>,
BillPedersen <pedersen at ccsscorp.com> writes: 

> Over the years there have been questions and queries about this but it
> does not seem like anyone has really moved forward on this so I did. 

Thanks.  Strange, though, that a third party has to tell other people 
how they can buy something from a company.

> I have done some research - including buying a VMS license and a
> support contract and have verified that it is possible to even submit a
> software support case. 

So we are talking about a one-time fee of a few hundred dollars for the
license and then a couple of hundred a year for patch access and the
support.  Presumably the right to upgrade to the next major version 
would cost more, but there probably won't be a next major version.  :-|

For anyone actually using VMS to make money, this is peanuts.  I'm 
surprised how many people choose other OSs because they are cheaper or 
even free as far as licenses go but end up paying about the same for 
support as they would for VMS and have to employ many more people.  OK, 
those people might earn less than VMS people, but the total cost is 
more.

Is this worth it for a hobbyist?  There has been some progress: one can 
download VMS in order to install it and also a recent update patch.  
This is probably enough for most hobbyists.  So, paying means access to 
newer patches and support.  In the good old days, hobbyist would often 
install newer patches before commercial people would and notice problems 
etc.  This was a service to the community which is no longer possible.  
But I doubt any hobbyist actually needs the latest patches if a 
reasonably recent update is available.

What does the support actually mean?  Sure, one can file a complaint and
hope that something happens, but a hobbyist can also post his complaint
here and perhaps someone with a support contract will enter it
officially.  For some reason, VMS MAIL was tampered with, at least on
Itanium, and some bugs were introduced.  Some, but not all, were later
corrected.  For example, this listing of messages wrapped---it used not
to wrap, regardless of terminal characteristics---and this was fixed,
except if one marks the messages, in which case they wrap by one
character.  Thus, the fix for the original problem looks like a quick
hack rather than a proper fix.  Suppose I had a support contract.  Would 
there be some guarantee that this would be fixed within a certain time?

By the way, does anyone know why MAIL was touched at all?