[Info-vax] Vax Station 4000 VLC

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Friday, 28 December 2018 19:27:13 UTC, Scott Dorsey  wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
> >The concept is old. Probably way older than 1980.
> >
> >But the term showed up in 1998 at the initiative of
> >Eric Raymond and some other people.
> >
> >Before that it was just "free software".
> 
> Please.  Free software is NOT the same thing as open source.
> Very different concepts.
> --scott
> -- 
> "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

And things like the POSIX standards recently mentioned are 
neither open source nor really free. 

The POSIX standards are vendor neutral, and at one time were seen 
by some people as the way of the future, because POSIX-compliance
would allow people and knowledge (and code and ...) to be usefully 
transferred between POSIX-compliant systems in a largely 
compatible way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

Even VMS had a POSIX-compatibility subsystem (in the general 
sense).

MS thought they would have to join the POSIX bandwagon, but 
in their usual fashion they didn't initially deliver much of 
technical relevance.

Then when Redmond decided that they could again get away with 
not delivering much at all (given that the huge MS-dependent 
ecosystem would have little option other than to Follow The 
Leader), POSIX itself became less relevant. Doesn't mean things
like POSIX were a bad idea, does highlight the short term 
disposable software+systems mindset of the typical 'modern' 
one-solution-fits-all commodity IT crowd. 

Meanwhile, Sun/Solaris has gone, HPUX has largely gone, Win16 
and Win32 are on life support, and GNU/Linux is largely taking
over the commodity world, even if folk choose to ignore the 
facts.

Over at IBM, MVS is apparently still with us, although IBM's 
purchase of red hat will be interesting.

VSIVMS seems to be still around too, even if their corporate 
website's homepage 'news' is mostly still stuck in early 2018?????