[Info-vax] inertia or fundamentals about langages?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-05-22 09:37:48 +0000, gérard Calliet said:

> 1) you report the un-cleverness to the context. Because if they had 
> choice, they would not be in inertia. So, or there is not any context 
> which is free to decide, or the context is in inertia.

A site that's locked at V5.5-2H4 and K&R VAX C or any other HPE OpenVMS 
release, and for whatever good or bad reason—or anything related to 
that Canadian PDP-11 hardware for that matter—are no more the future of 
VSI and of OpenVMS than punched cards and card readers are the future 
over at IBM.

> 2) my point is not to say there is not inertia, I agree with you, there 
> is such thing, and as you describe it ; but I don't agree with you if 
> you say that it is the *only* cause of lasting on VMS ; you can replace 
> "cleverness" by "value", and my opinion is that we stay (sometimes) on 
> VMS not only because of our inertia or of the inertia we undergo, but 
> because VMS, by its specific values and by the specific story of 
> building our solution on it has more value than other environments.

VSI and its predecessors have not been able to communicate that value. 
That value has variously been offset by other difficulties.  And that 
value has been offset by competitors.

The results of the last twenty years' OpenVMS upgrades hasn't been 
entirely competitive.

Yes, there are and have been and will be sites that fully use OpenVMS 
for its features and capabilities.

> 3) the (2) point is decisive to think about a future: it is only if 
> there is more value on VMS that VMS could get future success ; and yes 
> it's a commercial product, and its intrinsic value is not the only 
> cause for a success ; but if we forget the root, which is the value, 
> perhaps wwe'll not see in anytime the tree.

The root of the value for VSI for now is that it's OpenVMS, and it's a 
pain to port many of the existing apps off of OpenVMS.  And it's easier 
for those folks to upgrade to VSI OpenVMS, if (when?) they need support.

The root of the value of OpenVMS for end-users?  That varies. For a 
number of sites, it's that it's a pain to port apps off of OpenVMS.  
For others, specific OpenVMS features.  That varies.

No small part of that value for existing OpenVMS sites is the 
familiarity of the staff.  That's also not a benefit that's easily 
and/or inexpensively realized by new installations.  That's the "you 
need trained staff" cost.  You do.  But not for some of the things that 
OpenVMS needs trained and experienced staff for.  The user interface 
and API—I recently heard a rather long rant from somebody trying to use 
OpenVMS to do some simple operations—is a ongoing problem for new 
adoption.  Took me a few minutes to solve what had stymied them, but 
that for a situation that should not even exist.  There's a lot of this 
in OpenVMS.  Too much.

As for "future success", I've suggested two features that are still 
somewhat unique.  One—clustering—is priced out of common usage.  The 
other—multi-host RAID-1—is still fairly unique.

These and other benefits have clearly been insufficient to draw interest.

There are lower-end alternatives to what clustering provides many 
(though not all) apps, with the use NAS and redundant NAS via file 
shares, and with higher-end and higher-scale clustering configurations 
up where OpenVMS can't reach.

And as for clustering, there's that servers have gotten both much more 
dense and much faster and much more reliable than those of the VAX era. 
 And failover via VM or via database replication or other approaches 
works pretty well for some folks.

There are other OpenVMS features sometimes cited—logical names—that 
have equivalent of better alternatives on other platforms.  An 
integrated DLM, and that exists in other platforms.

VSI is working to remove some of the impediments, with the port being 
one of the earlier and larger impediments being resolved, and there are 
others.

>> And folks that are still running V5.5-2H4—clever or not, locally 
>> appropriate or not—are not part of the future of VSI OpenVMS.
> Do you really think my only customer is this strange one, and that all 
> I say is referred to it?

I know not which you believe strange.



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