[Info-vax] (Hypothetical only) Major new security issue for VAX/Alpha. What do you do ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2016-09-24, Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
> On 9/24/16 3:37 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>
>> At the moment, if a security researcher tells HP that a VMS issue
>> also applies to VAX/VMS, is the security researcher simply told
>> that VAX/VMS is no longer supported (in regards to new patches
>> being generated), or would the issue be evaluated to see what
>> impact it has on VAX systems ?
>
> Why would they? Do you think Apple evaluates current security issues to
> see if they apply to ancient versions of OS X that run on PowerPC Macs?
> Or Microsoft evaluates Windows bugs for Windows NT on Alpha?
>

Exactly Craig and that's exactly the point I am trying to make
to Kerry.

Providing the resources to do that costs serious money and the only
reason that some major Windows XP customers still get patches from
Microsoft is because they pay serious money each year to Microsoft
to make it profitable enough for Microsoft to produce those patches
and for Microsoft to maintain the infrastructure which allows those
patches to be produced in the first place.

The bulk of any remaining XP customers simply don't have access to
those patches and should instead have done the due diligence needed
to make sure their old XP systems can be operated reasonably safely
in a production environment (and replaced them if they can't).

Likewise, when VMS customers decided to run their old VMS systems in
production without VMS software support, did they also do the due
diligence needed to address possible future VMS security issues or
did they simply tell themselves that "those issues just don't apply
to VMS" ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world