[Info-vax] What Will Drive More OpenVMS Adoption?

[David Goodwin]

On Friday, December 3, 2021 at 5:44:29 PM UTC+13, Mike K. wrote:
> Honestly, I think that any new users will probably be coming out of the hobbyist/community license program. Basically people who try it out and use it for personal projects, and decide that they like it so much compared to Linux or Windows that when the time comes, they push to use VMS as a server platform for a work project. For this to happen, though, VMS needs to actually have all the pieces in place to serve a modern web app. This means not just a web server, but things like PHP, Python, node.js, etc. And a DBMS that folks can actually use. While Oracle may be planning to port Rdb to x86 eventually, it's not there yet, and even when it comes, will not have any hobbyist option available to allow new users to get to know it. This needs to be fixed, either by beating Oracle with a clue stick until something happens (unlikely) or by updating the woefully outdated version of MariaDB currently available for VMS. 
> 
> Documentation specifically aimed at new users who are primarily familiar with Linux of Window would be a help, as would a more reasonable set of default system parameter values that don't require an AUTOGEN cycle every time a significant software package is installed. 

Even if OpenVMS had all the pieces in place and could run modern workloads, why choose OpenVMS over Linux? What can OpenVMS do that Linux simply cant? What can it do significantly better than Linux? What makes the license cost and yearly renewals worth it?

Right now Linux is the native platform for most major software development tools and a lot (most?) of the server software people care about. Here OpenVMS has some of the same challenges as Windows. Why pay extra to run Linux software on Windows when you could just do what everyone else is doing and run Linux software on Linux? Why pay extra for worse support and extra bugs because windows ports are often a lower priority?

Are there any proprietary operating systems that have actually managed to take market share from Linux besides MacOS on the desktop? All the proprietary unixes are basically dead (aside from Solaris which survives in open-source form as Illumos) and Windows Server is probably loosing market share outside of Azure. I doubt IBM is gaining a lot of new mainframe customers.