[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-20 00:32:43 +0000, John Reagan said:

> On Monday, January 19, 2015 at 7:23:10 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
>> 
>> So get Perl, Python or Lua into the base distro, and with a decent set> 
>> of libraries, and -- like what is offered for DCL -- allow an easy 
>> path> for direct invocation.
> 
> My understanding is that the various legal departments don't want to 
> include GPL code on the base distribution with the fear that it would 
> require exposing all the source for all the pieces on the kit.

I'm well aware of the various GPLv2 and GPLv3 discussions, having been 
in more than a few of those meetings over the years.

> That was why the separate DVD with Apache, GNV, etc. was created.

Might want to have the legal folks skim the Perl (artistic), Python or 
Lua licenses, then.   Those packages are not GPL.

FWIW, Apache isn't under GPL.   It's under the Apache 2 license.  Nor 
are zip and unzip, for that matter, and those are a no-brainer for 
inclusion into VMS.

> Personally (although I'm not a lawyer), I don't think that having an 
> image with GPL doesn't taint the other images.

GNV and some other bits are GPL, and the inclusion of GPL software and 
particularly GPL3 software can be viewed as problematic in a 
closed-source package.  (This is also one of the reasons why I've 
commented about open-sourcing VMS in the past, as that would simplify 
some of the licensing and open-source integration.  Though this open- 
sourcing would obviously be a big mental shift and a business shift for 
the folks at HP, and quite possibly also for the folks at VSI.)

> However, adding regex() into the CRTL would be a problem.

Digging around finds the <https://github.com/laurikari/tre/> regular 
expression library, and there's also BSD grep 
<http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/grep/>, and llvm 
has regex bits including 
<http://www.llvm.org/docs/doxygen/html/Regex_8h_source.html> 
<http://llvm.org/docs/doxygen/html/Regex_8cpp_source.html>.  Other 
options are undoubtedly available, too.



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