[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[David Goodwin]

On Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 7:32:56 AM UTC+12, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <t3uplg$9o9$2... at dont-email.me>,
> clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote: 
> 
> > I keep wondering if VSI has gone for a policy of short-term income 
> > at the expense of damaging long-term income and I hope that isn't 
> > the case.
> I suspect they need to become profitable fairly quickly, or risk their 
> backers pulling the plug.
> > VSI appears to be relying on the remaining VMS user base being a 
> > captive userbase that can't easily move away, but that only works 
> > if being a captive user doesn't become too painful or too risky 
> > for the user.
> They are not in a position to grow the user base quickly, are they? 
> 
> Thinking about that, it would seem to require some new kind of 
> application software that works uniquely well on VMS, presumably because 
> of some VMS feature that is hard to port to Linux or Windows. The current 
> VMS user community doesn't seem likely to invent such a thing, nor do VSI 
> staff, because they're all very experienced with the current ways of 
> doing things. 
> 
> The most likely route for such an invention would seem to be from a 
> company with younger people, who decide to learn VMS and spot a new way 
> of using it. The correct kind of ISV programme could improve the odds of 
> this happening, but they still aren't great. 

As long as OpenVMS is as proprietary and closed source as it is I don't see
younger people paying much attention to it. Its just not worth investing effort
into something that could be taken away at any time. Most open-source 
projects are also going to have no interest in maintaining any level of support 
for some obscure proprietary operating system too so maintaining ports is 
going to be all on VSI.

Of course it doesn't have to be this way - Sun has proven that. OpenSolaris
is still being actively maintained and enhanced under the name Illumos.
There are a variety of Illumos distributions to choose from, Joyent use Illumos 
as the basis for their cloud platform (SmartOS), and there is some NAS
product that uses it too. Meanwhile the closed-source variant of Solaris
will probably disappear when support for 11.4 ends in 2034.

This is probably the only realistic path forward for OpenVMS that doesn't see
it managed into extinction. If it were open-sourced then the rest of the industry 
might pay it some attention, perhaps a community might form and pick up 
some of the maintenance and porting burden. It might get used in some new
products and solutions. Existing users would have less of a reason to abandon 
it.  And VSI would be uniquely positioned to provide support to commercial users.

But I don't see that happening. Too risky, too hard. And I suspect many
OpenVMS users would rather see the platform go extinct than be 
open-sourced.