[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[David Goodwin]

On Tuesday, July 28, 2020 at 10:04:26 AM UTC+12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <44caae34-4e58-48bb-a3fc-d2e0f9933b80o at googlegroups.com>,
> David Goodwin writes: 
> 
> > I wonder if VSIs license from HP allows them to release code under an open 
> > source license. The workstation/desktop bits are at this point I imagine 
> > fairly worthless and probably nothing more than a maintenance burden if its 
> > maintained at all.
> > 
> > Motif and CDE were already open-sourced several years back under the LGPL. 
> > So if VSI could release the VMS-specific bits under a compatible license 
> > perhaps the VMS workstation/desktop bits could be maintained outside of VSI 
> > by those that use it.
> 
> WHY?
> 
> VSI has made no announcement that they would drop "workstation" support, 
> i.e. on-chip graphics would be supported, so one could still run 
> DECwindows, CDE, etc.  I certainly want that to come with VMS and not 
> have to unload some gzipped tarball from the internet and install it 
> myself.  Maybe on-chip graphics on x86 are better than the most powerful 
> graphics cards in ALPHAs.

Reduce maintenance costs of course. Why maintain an X server, Motif and CDE ports in parallel to the open-source community? That's just unnecessary duplication of work for no real benefit. Using off-the-shelf bits doesn't mean it can't be shipped with VMS.

But if few people use DECwindows then perhaps the more likely situation is these bits simply aren't maintained aside from ensuring they still run as well as they did 20 years ago.