[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Simon Clubley]

On 2020-07-29, David Goodwin <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 at 6:03:52 PM UTC+12, John Dallman wrote:
>> In article <b12d3e1a-8a62-4ffa-a866-44cc21a54cdeo at googlegroups.com>,
>> (David Goodwin) wrote:
>> 
>> > Yep, and I really wish that wasn't the case. I very much wish 
>> > companies would just release the source for discontinued products 
>> > instead of lock them away where they can benefit no one until the 
>> > copyrights eventually expire in a century or so.
>> 
>> Those discontinued products often contain intellectual property that's
>> still meaningful. Showing that they don't is very expensive in code
>> review and legal time. 
>
> They may on occasion. For a little while. But that IP becomes worthless
> pretty quickly as the industry moves on and the backup tapes get lost,
> thrown in the bin or simply fail from old age. At that point the IP,
> for all intents and purposes, no longer exists in any usable form.
>

The company still owns the product even if it is in that state.

HPE still owns the PDP-11 operating systems; they just licenced further
development to Mentec. I doubt however that HPE could release newly
modified versions of RSX, RSTS/E or RT-11 today.

> If the product is known to contain no 3rd party code, its obsolete and
> never going to be sold again then nothing is lost by releasing its code.
>

And the legal costs in establishing that are the same. For example, how
do you know there isn't something similar to Display Postscript buried
somewhere in VMS ?

Why would a company expend the resources and costs on an obsolete product
to establish that ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.