[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/25/2022 10:06 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
> As long as OpenVMS is as proprietary and closed source as it is I don't see
> younger people paying much attention to it.

Insisting on using open source is mostly for people
in their 40's and 50's.

Young people don't care.

Fashion has changed. And besides much open source are now
dominated by big software companies.

>                                  Its just not worth investing effort
> into something that could be taken away at any time.

Young people does typical not look long term.

For those that does look long term then closed source vs open source
is not the most important factor. It is about expected future and that
is not determined by open/closed source status.

>                                                      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.

It is all about trust in the future.

Open source does not have a problem supporting Windows despite it
being closed source. Nobody expect it to go away.

> 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.

The Solaris path does not look attractive to me.

> This is probably the only realistic path forward for OpenVMS that doesn't see
> it managed into extinction.

Both Windows and commercial Linux seems to do fine. VMS could as well.

>                 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.

VMS users are infamous for their lack of enthusiasm when it comes to
actually do something.

:-(

And even outside the VMS world recent years has shown huge problems
with getting open source maintained.

Arne