[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Scott Dorsey]

David Goodwin  <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Tuesday, July 28, 2020 at 9:23:52 PM UTC+12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> 
>> 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.

The way I read it, they intend on porting it and keeping it the same with
minimal updates.  This seems reasonable since there has been so little
development going on with motif and cde anyway, and since the base of people 
developing new applications with them is pretty much zero.  And if it's not 
zero, it should be zero because we have so many better ways of doing things 
today.
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."