[Info-vax] Questions and observations about OpenVMS

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-03-06 21:44:26 +0000, Forrest Aldrich said:

> In follow-up, here are some questions and such I have about OpenVMS.
> 
> Consider this the perspective of an inexperienced user. I last touched 
> VMS back in the late 80's, but it was cursory at best.   I want to 
> understand OpenVMS today, it's role, application and possibly what 
> directions it could go in.


Rather than the point-by-point response that's now residing in my 
drafts folder, here are some questions and considerations for you to 
ponder.

Write yourself a product development and a product marketing plan for 
OpenVMS as a desktop server, which (presumably) provides local network 
files server, and authentication server, and mail server and such.

Some details to ponder for inclusion into that...

Who is your target market? How much are they willing to spend? How much 
work are they willing to endure to get the desired capabilities? Is the 
current VSI SaaS software licensing acceptable to enough of your target 
customers?

Describe what's missing from and what will be required to get OpenVMS 
to ~competitive in those markets, against current incumbents including 
Linux, BSD, and Windows Server.

Also describe how you'll position and market your new desktop server 
product against available alternatives, including Synology NAS 
servers—which offer substantially more than NAS—and other available 
locally-hosted or cloud-hosted app-hosting platforms.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages,
https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/high_availability
https://www.truenas.com/
https://nextcloud.com

Are your proposed customers going to be satisfied with 
however-much-of-a-terabyte of PDF manuals to read, and a command line 
as the desktop server management interface? Or will expectations differ?

Which programming languages and tools are expected by your target 
customers and/or by their ISV partners, for those users that are 
seeking to host their own apps on these OpenVMS desktop servers?

How will you convince ISVs and partners to spend on porting their apps 
and tools to OpenVMS? Money? Staff? You're going to have to show the 
ISVs sufficient revenues from somewhere, of course.

Since you mentioned clustering, describe what's currently involved with 
configuring and creating an OpenVMS cluster, and then with programming 
apps to install into and to then use clustering-related features, and 
whether or how you'll change that.

Describe how software and software updates are acquired and installed 
on OpenVMS now, and compare and contrast that to the mechanisms to 
download and verify and install apps on other platforms now, and then 
whether and how that might change?

Describe how to locate and to change the OpenVMS host name across 
OpenVMS, clustering, and some of the common apps and tools, and then 
whether and how that might change. (This is a trick question, as the 
number of system managers (admins) that can successfully rename an 
OpenVMS system is... small. Most of us just hack up a few of the many 
entries and call it done.)

Describe how to re-install OpenVMS without losing your existing content 
and apps and settings, and how to move your existing OpenVMS content 
and apps and settings to a separate OpenVMS server running the same or 
newer OpenVMS version.

Describe how to install a typical OpenVMS app, and tell us what manual 
configuration steps are required. Compare and contrast that with how 
apps are acquired and installed and removed on other servers.

Security is ~always at least secondary priority in a purchase, if not 
lower priority. The server has to do what you want it to do, first and 
foremost. That's seldom running security apps and tools.

How will you respond to questions about product and platform security, 
when somebody asks you about competitors' features? How much of the 
following does OpenVMS have, or need? Storage encryption, digital app 
signatures, app isolation, password and certificate stores, etc.
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/apple-platform-security-guide.pdf 


Should your proposed OpenVMS desktop server product include support for 
commercially-purchased digital certificates be added into OpenVMS? 
OpenVMS lacks that, at present.

Does your proposed server product require its own hardware (and is that 
acceptable to your target market?), or are you packaging your OpenVMS 
desktop server as a guest in a virtual machine running on the users' 
existing desktop?

How much (new?) source code and how much open-source inclusion will be 
involved in your new OpenVMS desktop server product? How long will that 
creation and integration and testing require? How many developers and 
support folks? For comparison of the scale involved for some of the 
products here, Mac OS X Tiger (a ~decade back) had ~80 million lines of 
code.  A Ford F-150 from ~six years back has 150 million lines of code. 
 OpenVMS was ~30 million lines back ~Y2K.  Here's the scale of modern 
software, circa 2015: 
https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/ 


TL;DR(1): what you are suggesting is absolutely possible, given 
sufficient time and money and developers. SMOP. Whether that investment 
can be recouped and how long that might take is central to what you're 
writing the product and marketing plans to address. And how and how 
fast the competitors might update their products and services and 
prices, both generally and in response to your new OpenVMS desktop 
server product.

TL;DR(2): Per a recent con-call, the VSI target market for OpenVMS is 
the existing installed base. This for the foreseeable future, too. 
Those plans will undoubtedly be re-evaluated as more revenue- and 
adoption-related information becomes available, including details such 
as how many OpenVMS-dependent apps go into production on x86-64, and 
how quickly.

TL;DR(3): welcome to business management, enjoy the ride.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC