[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 7/28/20 4:56 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
> 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.
> 

Welcome to the IT world.  More stuff has been saved (and continues
to be used!) for the TRS-80 than for systems like the VAX and, yes,
the PDP-11.

bill