[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/29/2020 5:08 AM, David Goodwin 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.
> 
> 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.

But it will cost a fortune to verify that the code does not have nay value.

And in this particular case we actually know that the code do have value 
- some of the VMS VAX code is used in VMS Alpha, Itanium and x86-64.

Arne