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

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Paul Sture wrote 2014-02-01 11:07:
> 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.
>

I we, as a customer, has not made *one* single support call
in the six years I've been with this customer. The contract
is mainly to be able to run later versions and patches.