[Info-vax] HP Integrity rx2800 i4 (2.53GHz/32.0MB) :: PAKs won't load

[lists at openmailbox.org]

On Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:25:07 -0500
David Froble via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> lists at openmailbox.org wrote:
> > On Sun, 28 Feb 2016 16:54:00 +0000
> > Kerry Main via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> The competition in the future and has been for the last 10+ years is
> >> not Solaris, AIX, z/OS etc, (DEC/Compaq/HP market positioning) but
> >> rather commodity OS's like Linux/Windows. This is especially true when
> >> VMS is being sold on the same server X86-64 architecture as
> >> Windows/Linux.
> > 
> > This is what I have been saying. Everybody may as well turn out the
> > lights and go home. Nobody is going to pay $$$$$ for VMS when they can
> > get nothing and like it with Linux.
> 
> Well, it's not free, if you need support.  How many sites are using Linux
> and such commercially without support?

Obviously nobody knows the numbers but I suspect it is more than many
people would think. I also have evidence there are significant "enterprise"
users who do their own support. Of course there is a cost to that but it
doesn't pay the bills for the guys making the Linux distros (RedHat, etc.)

It's still going to be cheaper running a free OS on crapware and paying
your own flunkies to write fixes than it will be to buy a premium OS and
pay premiums for VMS system managers when every highschool kid grows up
with Linux and nobody under 40 even knows what VMS is. Don't get me wrong,
things are the same in my world as far as the expense goes. But where they
draw the line is giving hardware and software away and competing with the
unwashed masses.

Anyway, you're going to need to sell an awful lot of support to keep a
company like VSI working. And I don't think they want to go there.

VMS needs to run on a premium (non-Intel) hardware platform or they'll be
gone in 5-7 years if it takes that long.

> It's a different world, expensive licenses are not such an easy sell
> anymore. Has nothing to do with the hardware.

True, things are tight and money is not flowing as in days of yore.

Yet the current state of affairs has to do with the hardware (Intel) and it
has to do with Linux. And there are plenty of companies selling big $$$$
software for free/cheap OS. You can get Linux for free but when you run it
on a healthy multicore core server and have to buy Oracle DB or DB2
etc. you're going to pay. Dearly. Same thing with database and app
appliances from various manufacturers that run on crapware with Linux
running underneath.

> As has been pointed out many times, capital purchases and operations
> costs are two different things, one is hard to get, the other is many
> times trivial to get.

It doesn't seem to stop Larry from sailing his yacht.