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

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-04-21, David Goodwin <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 1:43:02 PM UTC+12, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> > 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.
>> This is certainly the case for later versions, certainly anything with 
>> DECWindows in it. Lots of constraints there. 
>> 
>> I doubt it's the case for VMS 4.7 though, which was all in-house before 
>> the Era of Obsessive Code Reuse. 
>> --scott 
>
> Would DECwindows be such a problem today? The basic X server has
> always been open source and given DEC had a hand in designing and
> building X11 it seems unlikely the would have licensed 3rd party bits
> there.
>

Display Postscript. It had to be removed from DECwindows, so unfortunately
there's one example right there of third party code causing problems.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.