[Info-vax] OpenVMS V9.0-C Released July 29th

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/3/2020 2:16 PM, Terry Kennedy wrote:
> On Monday, August 3, 2020 at 1:01:55 PM UTC-4, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2020-08-03 15:25:02 +0000, clair.grant at vmssoftware.com said:
>>> I tried my best to ditch DECnet on x86 but there are just too many
>>> customers using it (we asked, it was very disappointing).
>>
>>  From hard lessons years ago, polls accrue incremental info at best and
>> most of which the product admin should already know or be able to
>> extrapolate. Polls seldom garner info on where the product should be
>> headed. If ever.
> 
> As the post you quoted from Clair said, VSI asked their current paying
> customers and Phase IV was in demand.
> 
> If you want to suggest that NETCONFIG.COM say "Are you really, REALLY
> sure you want to enable this feature because <blah blah>", that's one
> thing. But leaving it out when your customers told you they are using
> it and telling them "adapt or die" is a recipe for dying yourself.
> 
> Way back when the possibility of VMS on x86 was just being announced,
> I said that it was going to be a hard decision between porting it
> as-is, so customers could simply recompile (or VEST, if they didn't
> have the source code for their applications) and go, lowering the
> barrier to entry for existing VMS customers, or if there should be new
> compilers that accepted modern syntax. It appears from what I've read
> here that VSI chose the former, with select new compilers as needed.
> I assume they did enough research to decide that that was the best way
> to succeed.

 From a technical perspective it may sound tempting to drop
all VMS specific compiler features, drop the various LIB$/SYS$
function and go to standard compiler and go to a *nix system API.

But it would be a disaster business wise.

If the work to port from VMS Alpha or VMS Itanium to
VMS x86-64 is the same as porting to Linux x86-64, then
the vast majority of customers will pick the latter.

VMS needs to keep the existing customers via an
easy migration, add new features and have customers
move forward over time (and it may take a very long
time !!!!).

And VSI knows that.

Arne