[Info-vax] OpenVMS in the future, Open sourced or Closed? Intent is to keep it...

[seasoned_geek]

On Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 11:50:15 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> 
> Ayup.  Who is going to have the time and skills and servers and build 
> environment and the funding to work on the code, too.   Linux started 
> out and built a base in another era.
> 
> What would attract developers to OpenVMS?
> 

Well said Hoff.

Here is the reality, VMS serves a market which cannot use bottom feeding systems.

The simple truth is many/most companies currently using bottom feeding systems are only doing so because governments haven't held them accountable for massive identity thefts, data breaches, etc. We in the U.S. are all getting chipped cards because the government finally passed some laws changing who had to eat the cost of credit card fraud. Until that law changed rolling out chipped cards to stop credit card fraud was "too expensive."

There has been a movement for a while, and with an election coming up it may gain a lot of traction, to make the CEO, CIO, CFO and entire board of directors criminally liable for identity theft, data breaches, etc. By criminally liable I mean actual prison time, no more skating by with a token few months of "free credit monitoring."

In short, the current efforts trying to water down VMS to the point it is just as worthless as everything else out there are completely misguided and highly destructive. Those efforts need to be directed at the real problem. Wal-mart quality systems being used WHERE THEY SHOULD NOT LEGALLY BE ALLOWED.

Before anyone goes whining about "can't fight the system", people said that EXACT same thing when it came to changing who had to eat the cost of credit card fraud. "Oh, the credit card companies pay to many bribes and have to many lobbyists." Well guess what? It happened.

The same thing is on course to happen for identity theft/data breaches. 60 Minutes and other news agencies have been gearing up running identity theft research pieces. More will come as the election gets closer.

I have said it before and I will say it again. The day the CEO, CIO, CFO and entire board of directors are looking at a 6 month mandatory minimum for identity theft data breach Z/OS and VMS proprietary platforms won't be able to ship fast enough.

Before we went down this "open" path starting in the 90s, data and comm were both secure. You had to get proprietary equipment which was registered at point of sale and had IDs burned in. The communications packets themselves were also proprietary.

At some point, possibly after my death, governments around the world will realize you can never ever under any circumstances make "open" secure. The "open" portion must be from the Web page out and everything from the Web server back MUST BE PROPRIETARY.

Yes, I remember the dark days when people tried to use knock-off nic cards with Netware servers. It was a PITA. That PITA also made things more secure.