[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Dave Froble]

On 4/26/2022 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>>>>
>>>> (snip)
>>>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
>>>> (from them) out of production hardware.   I am not so sure when
>>>> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
>>>> by then.
>>>>
>>>> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
>>>> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>>>>
>>>
>>> There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
>>> apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
>>> weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
>>> conclusion of basically "forget that!".
>>>
>>> Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
>>> writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
>>> required bits and knowledge are freely available.
>>>
>>> For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
>>> that such an emulator would require.
>>>
>>> Simon.
>>>
>>
>> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist.
>> Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>>
>
> Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
> that Alpha cannot be used for.

I don't see anything like that?

What can itanic do that Alpha cannot?  It's a shared code base.

> Of course, that ceases to be a problem once everything, including
> building VMS itself (and the compilers), is running natively on x86-64 VMS.
>
> Simon.
>


-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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