[Info-vax] Beyond Open Source

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-08 05:38:37 +0000, IanD said:

> Opensource gains favour when one rapid development of a new idea but as 
> the article alludes to, becomes more and more difficult as a project 
> grows and code contributions come in from an increasing number of 
> sources

It also becomes more difficult as the scale of the problems increases.  
Even for the side projects, I'm working on vastly bigger problems than 
I once was.   Better tools and better frameworks help somewhat here — 
this is part of why I whinge so often about tools and frameworks, and 
why working on other platforms can produce results more quickly — and 
part of the increases in scale of the work just involves working with 
ever-larger groups of people (or taking longer and longer to get 
anywhere particularly useful).

> I mentioned open source for VMS especially if a new stack was going to 
> be developed but the jury is out on that one

A new stack?  Are we referring to OpenVMS or to IP or to something 
else?   Bootstrapping takes vendor and community commitment, and a 
bunch of people, a whole lot of time, and — again — better tools and 
frameworks.   The developer and user expectations are also moving 
forward rather more quickly, particularly in comparison to the pace of 
OpenVMS in recent years.

> Lots of examples of open source being used to fork projects when people 
> see a different end need for the software in question - I don't think 
> VMS has that luxury at this stage, the base is too small at this stage

Are you thinking of forking OpenVMS itself?  If so, I'm skeptical that 
a non-commercial or non-commercially-funded entity would get anywhere 
with such a project, beyond basic maintenance.

There just aren't enough folks with the free time necessary and 
particularly the interest necessary to pull something with ~30 million 
lines of code forward (fast enough to matter) to bring more folks onto 
the platform.  Even within the OpenVMS community, there are and will be 
schisms; some see OpenVMS as a desktop platform and some as an embedded 
server platform.  Some look askance at newer tools and approaches, and 
others want or need those.  Some folks are absolutely dependent on 
formal vendor support and/or Oracle databases or other features, and 
others not so much.

> As long as there are enough core developers to keep enhancements and 
> bug fixes coming in a reasonable time frame

Out of curiosity, how many folks do you think is "enough"?  VSI is 
aimed at a ~hundred full-time paid folks, and only a fraction of those 
will likely be working on OpenVMS itself (some will be working on 
infrastructure, customer support, and in administration and management, 
etc), and they probably really want more folks than the ~hundred.   It 
wouldn't surprise me to be able to utilize four or five hundred 
full-time paid folks without too much effort, for the kernel and for 
all those parts and pieces and layered products that are now typically 
part of the kernel, and for layered products and tools.  Again, the 
scale of the problems has increased, as have the expectations, as has 
the surprisingly difficult problem of increased simplicity.  Xcode is 
rather larger than LSEDIT, the newer language standards tend to be 
larger and more complex, and the typical web-facing tools and libraries 
and frameworks are rather larger than libwww and Mozilla Seahorse and 
Apache HTTPD, for instance.  Put another way, an operating system 
project is the proverbial bottomless pit of software developers — up 
until "tactical incompetence" becomes "strategic incompetence", you can 
want and need and use as many developers as you have access to.



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