[Info-vax] New VSI Roadmap (yipee!)

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-02-28, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:
> On 2015-02-28 15:57:39 +0000, Kerry Main said:
>
>> Now, if there had not been such a significant increase in the OS 
>> instances, the monthly security patches might have been more
>> manageable, but the culture of 1 or 2 bus apps per OS instance that
>> was established in the distributed days of commodity OS's (and 
>> significantly boosted by the likes of VMware) has resulted in the 
>> OPS groups throwing up their hands and have adopted 
>> patch-n-pray.
>
> Not having patches and not having updates concerns me as much ? if not 
> more ? than having patches to apply.  VMS just is not that secure.  

Congratulations Hoff, you got it in one.

About a year or two ago when Kerry was in full flow about his 10-40
patches a month, I did an analysis of the RHEL patches for a month
(and posted the results to comp.os.vms).

What I found was that for many of the patches, they either covered
application level software issues which should have been investigated
for VMS as well (PHP, Java, etc) or involved functionality which
simply doesn't exist on VMS.

For that month's worth of data, the number of core Linux issues with
comparable VMS core functionality were _way_ under that 10-40 patches
per month number Kerry likes to use.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world