[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[David Goodwin]

On Tuesday, July 28, 2020 at 9:23:52 PM UTC+12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <5400ddbc-dc1f-411a-ba73-82b73cc54e64o at googlegroups.com>,
> David Goodwin writes: 
> 
> > Problem is CDE these days is under the LGPL. We've been told VSI doesn't 
> > have the rights to re-license any of the code they've received from HPE. This
> > means they can't update to any recent release of CDE. So I guess that means
> > that the existing desktop environment stays largely as is with no further
> > updates.
> 
> How many people use CDE, Motif, DECwindows etc. on VMS?  Claims here are 
> that it is (today) a very small minority.  Speaking for myself, I would 
> have no objection whatsoever if it stays largely as is with no further 
> updates.
> 
> There are WAY more-important things to do.

If few people are using these things will they remain long term at all? Does VSI
plan on porting all this old stuff to x86 for the few people that use it? Simply 
keeping it as is does still involve some maintenance burden (building & testing 
it for new releases, fixing any security issues that turn up, etc).

If they do end up removing it entirely then that comes back around to the 
open-source point. If the source could be released then the few people who do 
use it could take over maintenance. But we now know that's not a
possibility. Like with VAX, anything that drops out of support will just 
disappear forever.