[Info-vax] Licenses on VAX/VMS 4.0/4.1 source code listing scans

[David Goodwin]

On Tuesday, December 14, 2021 at 10:45:50 AM UTC+13, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <6bee4a78-ea32-47fb... at googlegroups.com>,
> David Goodwin <dgso... at gmail.com> writes: 
> 
> > Unless it gets open-sourced I don't think its realistic for VSI to increase 
> > adoption much beyond companies currently running older HPE releases.
> What will VSI have as income if it is open-sourced? Only support? 
> Probably not viable. 

What will VSI have as income if they're not winning over Linux/Windows users
and their existing customers slowly leave? 

> And the VMS way of doing things and the open-source way are not always 
> compatible.

At the same time it was likely the only chance VMS had at some form of long-term survival.

HPE OpenVMS licenses can only be transferred with HPEs permission. VSI licenses
expire. The continued legal availability of OpenVMS in any form depends on HPE 
willing to process license transfers and VSI remaining in business to issue new licenses.

Many proprietary operating systems have been down this path already. The outcome
is always the same - demand gets to the point where its no longer commercially viable
and no more OpenVMS.

Solaris is the only one I can think of that took a different path. Oracle seems to be
only doing maintenance on it now but that doesn't really matter. Sun released the
source code back in 2008. After the Oracle acquisition the community forked OpenSolaris
as Illumos, got it building building and continues to maintain it today. Joyent/Samsung 
pay a few people work on it as they use it as the basis for some cloud platform. The
open-source descendant of Solaris will be around for as long as there is anyone with an 
interest in running it.