[Info-vax] VSI and Process Software announcement

[Neil Rieck]

On Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 8:09:25 PM UTC-4, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On 10/26/16 6:30 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> > On 2016-10-23 23:38, David Froble wrote:
> >> Hans Bachner wrote:
> 
> >> Don't know the deal, but, if VSI finds something they like better in
> >> TCPWare, perhaps they can choose to use that.
> >
> > The announcement says (to quote the quote above): "The license allows
> > VSI to integrate features of Process Software's MultiNet software..."
> >
> > Seems like VSI would need a separate license if they wanted to pick on
> > TCPware... Now I'm sure that could be arranged easily, if wanted, but
> > going by the quote above, I think it's safe to say that VSI is going to
> > use MultiNet, and not TCPware.
> 
> I would think TCPware and Multinet would be pretty much the same thing
> under the hood by now, just with different user interfaces. At least I'm
> pretty sure merging the code was the plan when the two companies that
> made those products merged 15+ years ago. Of course sometimes plans are
> abandoned or delayed indefinitely.

I have used both TCPware (since 1992) and MultiNet (since 2015) and can tell you that they are two totally different products. Three years ago when we were moving from Alpha to Itanium, we were told by PSC that TCPware did not support IPv6 and never would (MultiNet already supports IPv4 and IPv6). This was bad news for us because we depended upon two TCPware APIs (the "TELNET Library" and the "FTP Library") so we had to write our own lower level code to replace it.

So unless PSC has changed their position on TCPware (re: IPv6) active OpenVMS systems should be thinking about moving to MultiNet.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net