[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[David Goodwin]

On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 8:28:10 PM UTC+12, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743... at googlegroups.com>,
> dgso... 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.

Yeah, Illumos isn't popular or widely used. But its also not dead - something
Solaris and OpenVMS will both be in a decade or two. Possibly Illumos
would be more widely used if Oracle had chosen OpenSolaris as the path
forward rather than trying to make it proprietary again. But the other challenge
to OpenSolaris being popular is its close enough to Linux that its probably hard
to justify choosing it over the more popular alternative.

Here a hypothetical open source OpenVMS has a better chance. Porting 
to Linux is going to take a lot of effort so as long as the future of OpenVMS is
secure a lot of businesses aren't going to bother. And the current VSI
licensing strategy is a pretty big threat to the platforms long term
viability.

> > 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. 

This one I imagine is pretty easy to deal with at this point. HPE has no
further use for OpenVMS - its only remaining value is in whatever fees they're
collecting from VSI. They'd probably be willing to accept accept a lump sum
to transfer the copyrights and walk away.

But managed decline is probably a safer bet than paying a pile of money to
open-source it. They'll make some amount of money for a decade or two.
Then they'll end maintenance and support but perhaps continue to renew
licenses for a while longer until the number of remaining customers isn't
worth it then they'll abandon OpenVMS and the platform will go extinct.