[Info-vax] VMS porting (again), was: Re: CPython has removed OpenVMS support

[Paul Sture]

David Froble wrote:

> Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
>> JF Mezei wrote 2014-01-24 21:07:
>>> On 14-01-24 13:49, Keith Parris wrote:
>>>
>>>> Contrary to your conjecture, VMS Engineering in India did determine what
>>>> things prevented OpenVMS from running on Poulson (i4 Servers) and
>>>> released code fixing those roadblocks in Update V0500.
>>>
>>>> to do a complete job and that they had the knowledge and skills to do
>>>> it; it was a business decision by HP not to provide the financial
>>>> investment to achieve that.
>>>
>>> So where did they get the money to fix the OS level "roadblocks" and
>>> produce that V0500 update ?
>>>
>> 
>> Now, how much money was that? Tell us, since you know that
>> they had to "get" it somewhere. Getting it running doesn't imply
>> that it also used all new Poulson features.
>> 
>>> Lets face it, HP didn't have to recompile everything to take advantage
>>> of Poulson, it would at least have honoured HP's promises/commitments to
>>> customers by allowing newer hardware to work and letting customer
>>> recompile their own apps to take advantage of performance changes.
>>>
>> 
>> Things does run but not using the new Poulson specific things. It does
>> run faster simply becuse the higher CPU frequency. A "recomile" would
>> not change a bit since it would still produce the same EXE without
>> a compiler that was specificaly ported to Poulson.
>> 
>> Neither yolu or I have any deeper insight in the business
>> decision not to "port" VMS to Poulson. Probably there
>> was not enough customers wanting Poulson support. It
>> the best guess one can make anyway.
>> 
>
> The things that occur to me are:
>
> 1) These people don't get paid only when they are working on an approved 
> project, at least I'd think so.  If they have nothing else to do at 
> times, why not port to the new CPU?  Somebody doesn't want that to 
> happen ???

Ah but in a large corporate everyone fills in timesheets and such work
does end up on a different budget.

New projects or extending/enhancing existing projects create head
count liabilities and other long term commitments, I suppose.

> 2) Anybody on a support contract has already paid for having the 
> updates.  Seems like HP doesn't want to provide what they are taking 
> money for.

I think that's been true for a long time.

-- 
If you make it well enough, you give it immortality.” -- Ernest Hemingway