[Info-vax] East Coast and West Coast, Cathedral, Bazaar (was: Re: Vax Station 4000 VLC

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-28 14:14:21 +0000, gérard Calliet said:

> What has been invented is more than open access to sources, but all a 
> new way of thinking and determining copyrights, and with this and the 
> ideas behind open source has been a huge business success.
> 
> I'm not a fanatic open source fighter, but I think we have to 
> understand why they have been successfull when in the same time DEC was 
> dying, althought there was alos strong ideas behind it.
> 
> Something based on strong ideas won in the west coast, and something 
> based on strong ideas failed in the est coast. Perhaps we could think 
> about it when we relaunch something in the est coast.
> 
> (I don't speak about IBM or MS, because their succeess are more based 
> on pure structural business causes, and my purpose here is to think 
> about relation between fundamental ideas and story of business 
> computing).

Copyright is far from new, and Steamboat Willy will seemingly always be 
protected.  There's not much new arising here, other than whatever 
flies out of the usual sorts of adjudication that's been going on since 
the invention of the contract, the codicil, and the barrister.   
Creative contracts and licenses are far from new, particularly around 
commercial software.

More centrally to what you're referring to, we've seen the scale of 
software and the associated software development teams increase 
massively in the past couple of decades, and we've seen consolidation 
among fewer packages and configurations.

Newer open-source packages do arise—such as nginx—and older packages 
that no longer meet requirements can and do fade.  But the scale and 
the complexity of many of these software, hardware and firmware 
projects are massive and increasing, as compared with what was routine 
in the previous millennium.

There are very few direct commercial closed-source competitors against 
functional open-source packages, too.  Tough commercial market that, 
competing against folks that give away their products, and with the 
software replication costs near or at zero.

And as for the "Cathedral" or "East Coast" approach that you're 
referencing—the original design of OpenVMS—that was quite good, though 
that design reflects trade-offs and limits from ~forty years ago.  In 
this era, parts of the OpenVMS designs are old and very limited, and 
variously very broken.  These design problems are both technical and—by 
all appearances—are also inate within the traditional DEC software 
licensing, and within the DEC business, marketing and sales practices.

As a specific example of problems, the default OpenVMS development 
environment is seriously inadequate, as compared with the tooling 
available on other platforms.  The oft-vaunted security is another area 
that needs substantial work.  Try using TLS on OpenVMS.  Create a TLS 
connection and verify the certificates on both ends trace back to 
currently-enabled commercial certificate authorities.   I *dare* you.

The mistakes and the limitations are something VSI will be working on 
of course.  Though so too will be the competing vendors, and the 
open-source developers.   And the OpenVMS product has to provide enough 
revenue to matter, or VSI is gone.  Which means a focus on the 
installed base, for the foreseeable future.  Which will lead to more 
than a few compromises and lingering messes—undoubtedly including 
BACKUP and its design and error mishandling, for instance—and which 
will mean that VSI will be working to capture and keep as much of the 
installed base as they can.  And the many folks outside the installed 
base are going to continue to use Windows and Linux and other 
open-source packages, absent a good reason to select and migrate to and 
use OpenVMS.

Best too to ponder the implications and the effects and the outcomes of 
ideas such as _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_, too.  The author of that 
work has become a controversial figure in recent years too, to say the 
very least. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7608563 among 
other discussions.   And for those inclined for deeper thought on this 
and related topics, _Open Source Culture and Aesthetics_ and suchlike: 
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/462202

As for your reference to "they", Open source is already part of and 
will continue to be a fundamental and increasing part of OpenVMS, and 
of the environments that OpenVMS is installed and used in and 
interoperating with.   And again, VSI has to make a profit.  Which 
means they're going to use open source where they can, rather than 
writing and supporting their own and—at the scale of complexity we're 
increasingly working—less-than-competitive alternatives, absent very 
good reasons to the contrary.

TL;DR: Markets just don't always go where the adherents of particular 
platforms and tooling might want.  Bizarre, right?







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