[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[John Dallman]

In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743-b466-a5ae1599aa38n at googlegroups.com>,
dgsoftnz at gmail.com (David Goodwin) wrote:

> 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.

Not all that widely used, though. My employers provided several products
for SPARC Solaris for decades, and phased it out because Oracle were
making less and less sense. Never had any customer interest in Illuminos,
or even Solaris x64 when that was still going. All the plausible
customers for that just went to Linux. 

> Meanwhile the closed-source variant of Solaris will probably 
> disappear when support for 11.4 ends in 2034.

Certainly will. 

> 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.

Quite possibly, but don't forget that VSI don't own OpenVMS. They have a
license from HPE to maintain, support and upgrade it, but they don't own
the intellectual property. They don't have the ability to open its source.
HPE seem most unlikely to spend the lawyer-years required to get all the
rights clear. 

As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it
requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it
has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first. 

John