[Info-vax] GNV

[Chris]

On 09/11/16 14:57, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2016-09-11 14:48:13 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:
>
>> On 9/11/16 8:31 AM, IanD wrote:
>>
>>> Is gnu released as part of OpenVMS now? Isn't it a separate download?
>>> Why? Why isn't it part of the standard OpenVMS distribution and install?
>>
>> I assume you mean GNV, not gnu? Some of it is probably covered by
>> GPLv3 now and might pose problems for inclusion with the base OS. But,
>> generally speaking, yes, why not? Apple has something like 200 open
>> source packages distributed with macOS, which is close to two orders
>> of magnitude more than VMS has without extra installations.
>
> I've not encountered any GPL3 source code in OS X / macOS. What I have
> encountered is generally BSD/MIT, GPL2, or Apple-licensed. Most of the
> OS X / macOS kernel is open source, as are some tools and components,
> though large tracts of user-land are definitely not open source. This
> approach allows incorporating GPL2 source code, though open-sourcing
> OpenVMS is an approach reportedly unavailable to VSI.
>
> https://opensource.apple.com
>

I don't see any reason why the core of VMS needs to be open source, no
more than Solaris is. As usual, you need to take the systems view. If
VSI create the infrastructure to support the os package model, the rest
will follow naturally.

With Linux and others on X86, packages are generally available ready to
install and run. Often just a download, install and run within minutes.
For other architectures, it's not so simple, as the packages are only
available as source, and must be built. I've been looking at FreeBSD on
Sparc recently (don't ask), where the package collection is available
as a "ports" collection. Can be installed along with the OS source at
install time, but must be compiled etc before use. Sparc is a tier 2
architecture for FreeBSD, which means it's not fully supported. To get
round variations in architecture, each port has a set of patches applied
as part of the build process for that port. So, change directory to the
port in question and make install, which optionally downloads the
package, applies the patches, builds and installs. A similar scheme
could be used by VSI for packages and still be unencumbered by any
licensing issues...

Chris