[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 7/29/20 9:35 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> 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.

What better way do you have to do graphics on VMS?

bill