[Info-vax] Releasing VMS openly, was: Re: vax vms licenses

[chris]

On 04/19/22 01:25, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 4/18/2022 8:11 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-04-18, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> On 4/18/2022 6:43 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>> but they ALSO are not interested enough to release the software
>>> openly either.
>>>
>>> That I believe!
>>
>> HPE _can't_ release VAX/VMS openly, at least without investing in a
>> lot of resources, money, and time to review the VMS codebase and
>> any licence agreements with third parties that might have IP within
>> VMS.
>>
>> Before an open release could even be considered, HPE would need to
>> see how they stand in that regard.
>>
>> That's not just an academic question either as it has already
>> happened even with the paid-for commercial licences for VMS.
>>
>> Does anyone else here remember the "fun" with Display Postscript ?
>
> Another example. Sun's release of OpenJDK.
>
> In October 2006 Sun CEO promised to release OpenJDK as open source
> in 30-60 days. It was a top priority for the CEO. First actual
> release happened in May 2007 and contained several closed source
> binaries (4% of the code). In May 2008 it was down to 1%. And
> in April 2009 a build all open source was done (Redhat contributed
> some replacements for the last Sun closed source code). 2.5 years
> and a lot of engineering and legal work - for something that
> was a top priority for the CEO.
>
> Arne
>


That was Sun, who had a mission to make Solaris open source as
well, still being developed and thriving to this day, Openindiana,
with many ex Sun engineers contributing to the project. More or
less equivalent to Solaris 11, full desktop with xfce4, out of
the box...

Chris