[Info-vax] IS everyone waiting?

[Craig A. Berry]

On 10/20/16 8:46 PM, David Froble wrote:
> Craig A. Berry wrote:
>> On 10/20/16 4:57 PM, David Froble wrote:

>>> Again, if you have HP support, are you confident they could fix the
>>> problem?
>>
>> HPE is a huge company with lots of capable people and the wherewithal to
>> do the right thing whenever it chooses to. It may not choose to as often
>> as we would like, but getting help on unsupported software is a lot less
>> likely than getting help on supported software.

> I do have a bias.  I would not trust HP to "do the right thing".  Their
> track record sort of shows that.

Nor do I particularly. And I can't imagine why anyone running away from
the end of HPE Alpha support would run toward another release of HPE
anything. But they have produced plenty of fixes to system crashers in
recent years and are still better at distributing patches than VSI is,
even for VSI-produced patches.

>  Do I need to mention more than SSL1, which I can get to work VMS
> to VMS, but not VMS to anything else.  It's probably my fault, not too
> proud to admit that.

This sounds more like your SSH problems than your SSL problems, but it's
hard to keep track.

> So, what's your VMS software support contract with HP really worth?

Not as much as it used to be given that the price did not go down when
they stopped producing upgrades. But the possibility of getting a fix
for a serious bug seems preferable to the certainty that it won't,
especially if it's a security-related bug.

After HPE support ends, I suspect a lot of people will run unsupported
and rely on the possibility of an emergency upgrade to a VSI Alpha
release if a major exploit becomes known. Not a great plan, but planning
is not generally what has people running OpenVMS Alpha in 2016.