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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/5/2021 6:14 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
> 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.

Interesting question.

VSI is currently focusing a lot on existing VMS customers and
not so much on how to get new VMS customers.

But new VMS customers would of course be nice.

First I think we need to realize that VMS is unlikely to ever compete
with Linux in the commodity server market.

If you need to run thousands of servers with PHP or node.js, then
the OS price matters. VMS will be too expensive. Heck - a lot
of them consider RHEL too expensive and goes for RockyLinux or
Ubuntu.

VMS market will definitely be the slightly more expensive
server market where the OS cost is a very small part of
total cost and competitors are RHEL and Windows Server.

I don't think OS cost is a big issue in healthcare, finance,
defense etc..

Going after that market combined with a pricing that is competitive
with RHEL and Windows Server will handle the cost issue.

(HW cost of VMS boxes will be resolved by the x86-64 port)

And even though this market may only be like 10% of the server
market then the market is still more than big enough for VMS.

It is obviously a prerequisite for VMS to get new customers to
provide a decent set of tools and platform products - otherwise
VMS will be disqualified.

But that still leaves the question why would new customer choose
VMS over Linux.

Maybe VSI can try pushing "less is more" / "small is good". Both
Linux and Windows has become huge. To some extent they can be tailored
down (especially Linux), but still a simple OS may have a justification.

Arne