[Info-vax] C99 stuff (Re: The Road to V9.0)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/8/2019 11:28 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 6/8/2019 7:44 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 6/8/2019 10:04 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>> Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>> On 6/7/2019 5:22 PM, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
>>>>> On 6/7/2019 3:48 PM, IanD wrote:
>>>>>> The hobbyist program is eagerly awaited
>>>>>> [...] I've seen little evidence
>>>>>> even the new code VSI has written for VMS will be open sourced.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's not going to happen; give it up.
>>>>
>>>> Just curious Rob, is that a business decision, or determined by prior
>>>> legal agreements?  I've read before that what VSI writes is their own
>>>> property.
>>>
>>> Well, for one thing customers don't -want- it to be open-sourced.
>>> Opening it would be like shooting yourself in the foot because it
>>> kills much of what people like about commercial operating systems.
>>
>> I don't think you are right about this.
>>
>> Some people have emotional bias pro or con
>> open source.
>>
>> But the key decisions makers usually only
>> have a strong pro feeling about making money.
>>
>> I don't see why they would prefer:
>>
>> NNNNNN features + source not available
>>
>> over:
>>
>> NNNNNN features + source available
>>
>> Arne
> 
> Because when every Tom, Dick, and Harry, along with every Sally, Jane, 
> and Alice start hacking up custom code, who knows what the outcome will 
> be, AND, you'll be the sole tester of the code, instead of code that is 
> checked and tested by many.
> 
> If you gotta write custom code, then do so, but stay out of stuff that 
> most are not qualified to touch.

Not really.

closed source works like:

vendor produce product X
   customer A use X as is

open source works like:

vendor produce product X
   customer A use X as is
   customer B hack X to become Y

A does not care about what B does.

Besides that then very few open source customers actually hack the
code.

My guess is that it is less than 1 per 10000 Redhat customers that do so.

Arne