[Info-vax] Ask the Wizard archives?

[Jim Causey]

Red Hat is also in a position of tremendous market success and can afford (market-share wise) the risks coming from milking their customers over documentation — and benefit from a massive pool of engineers who have trained up on free documentation and source-code access for decades.

OpenVMS doesn’t have these same tailwinds, in particular, the massive base of engineers who have developed affinity and expertise on widely available documentation.

VSI has a ton of smart leaders and hopefully they’ve done the right modeling and examination of their success factors; and their strategy may fully accept the risk of not expanding their base over doubling-down on paying enterprises.  It still feels short-sighted, but I don’t have any revenue responsibility for this business so my opinion is worth less that I was paid for it ;)

 IMO it’s even short-sighted for Red Hat, as this will continue the trend of startups and other engineers moving to other distros.  But Red Hat can afford that right now.