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

[seasoned_geek]

On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 11:01:34 PM UTC-5, David Froble wrote:
> seasoned_geek wrote:
> > 
> > This fantasy you believe in only works if a single individual can and does posses _ALL_ of the hardware and environment to build from source _AND_ deploy raw to target. This is why wanna-be dutifully disrespected platforms "thrive" as OpenSource and no serious platform does.
> > 
> > As was pointed out by Hoff. Building VMS from source requires phenomenal setup and significant resources.
> 
> But once all the requirements are set up and available, many would be 
> capable of doing the build.  Not that I'm advocating such.  As I've 
> written more than once, the reason I wanted to see VMS open sourced was 
> to insure someone at HP could not decide to just delete everything.
> 

Well, I trust Hoff when it comes to this and if he says few, if any, are capable of setting up such an environment, I believe him.

We aren't talking about a hokey wanna-be OS like Linux, Windows, BSD, etc.

There is also the issue of all the conditional compilation in the source code which exists for military and/or very high security clearance eyes only.