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

[seasoned_geek]

@Javier,

I scrolled back a bit and did not see your question. I'm still a long way from 100%, but will attempt to answer it.

Once ported to X86 VMS will have a lifespan of 15 minutes.

This is the statement you have asked about, correct. Well, it is true and for many reasons.

Over the years there has been a groundswell of lemmings putting on coke bottle thick rose colored glasses, lining up to take an industrial sized hit off the herb filled hookah then race to the cliff shouting "if we only add OpenSource XYZ so many will pooooooorrrrrrt" splat. They never last long enough to finish that sentence with the one word which has historically been the case, "away".

You can visit Neil Rieck's  sympatica (sp?) site to find out the date VMS was banned from black hat conferences after surviving N conference days without ever giving up the flag while all of these "popular" operating systems were penetrated like dishes of melted butter for dunking crab legs.

Now, if you check, you will find (Open)VMS is welcomed with open arms. Previously it never gave up the flag, now it gives up the flag about as often as the "popular" systems. Those systems haven't gotten any better. VMS has gotten worse. Why? Between the time it was banned and now we have had the endless stream of lemmings putting on those coke bottle thick rose colored glasses, taking that industrial sized hit off the herb filled hookah and jumping off the OpenSource cliff. The carrion eaters cannot begin to keep up with the pile. 8-lane wide security breaches in the form of OpenSource products have been added hand over fist. The OpenSource backers have made it their mission in life to ensure VMS is just as weak and feeble as the "popular" platforms.

Ye-gads, just how long did the black hats know about the Bash shell and SSL and (insert widely publicized breach here) before the white hats found out?

It was my hope that VSI would peel each and ever piece of OpenSource or OpenSource based stuff out of the next release of VMS. We will also just take "Open" out of the name while we are at it.

The one and only thing VMS has left going for it is clusters with up-times measured in decades. In short, even in a post Itanic world, the one thing which made VMS special was the hardware.

I was privileged enough to hear Mr. Ken Olsen speak at a Chug-a-lug meeting. During that meeting he pointed out people didn't buy DEC for the hardware, they bought it to get VMS. The hardware just happened to make VMS great without getting credit.

Today we have companies selling $80 CPUs stuck onto a blade for $8K+. They stick dozens/hundreds of these things in cabinets and load them up with multiple "server instances". Now when one of those $80 CPUs cooks it doesn't take down just one server, it takes down 4 or 8. More than 90% of those "instances" have zero recovery capability. The transactions which were being processed are simply lost.

A few years ago I participated in a discussion with a bunch of supposedly knowledgeable IT people running the server systems for various etailers. At the time there was a great ripping of hair and rending of garments over "abandoned shopping carts". The initial surveys and discovery identified something like 60-80% of all abandoned shopping carts happened because the user lost connection. The bulk of the time it was not the user who lost connection, but the worthless x86 blade the server instance they were connected with gagged.

When it was pointed out to those supposedly knowledgeable IT people that they were trying to run on high availability business on a worthless platform they became completely indignant. Rather than fixing the real problem, they funded new studies which broke things out even finer so that one had to add a dozen or so rows on the spreadsheet to find out just how many times their worthless server platform cost the company money.

In short, they weren't going to pay for a real platform which would use MQ Series and ACMS spread across various data centers on real computers creating a system with BOTH guaranteed delivery AND guaranteed execution. In short, they believed it was "cheaper" to continue using "free stuff" creating what various industry analysts peg as an $18 Billion per year problem for the etailing industry.

Why will VMS have a life span of 15 minutes once ported to the x86? Because absolutely NOTHING is respected on the x86. Period.

Despite all of the weakening, dare I say, cancer, OpenSource has inflicted on VMS, it STILL is the only OS with up-times measured in decades. Once ported to the X86 it will have up-times measured in hours like every other worthless OS on that platform.

Ain't nobody going to _pay_ for that.