[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[John Dallman]

In article <f83619d5-0856-458a-a044-945dbb203e11n at googlegroups.com>,
dgsoftnz at gmail.com (David Goodwin) wrote:

> Possibly Illumos would be more widely used if Oracle had chosen
> OpenSolaris as the path forward rather than trying to make it
> proprietary again. 

>From what I know about Oracle, that was never in prospect. Their reason
for buying Sun was to be able to optimise the SPARC hardware and Solaris
to improve Oracle DB performance and get a more compelling offering than
Oracle DB on other vendors' hardware. It turned out that all the easy
optimisation had been done already, and developing new generations of
SPARC hardware would be expensive. 

They never showed any interest in Solaris on x86-64, although taking that
up would have allowed developing optimised machines for Oracle DB at far
lower cost than new SPARC processors. 

> But the other challenge to OpenSolaris being popular is that it is 
> close enough to Linux that its probably hard to justify choosing it
> over the more popular alternative.

I think that's the main factor. 

It also lacks the large number of companies and people that have adopted
Linux and have vested interests in its success. There may not be room for
lots of successful open-source operating systems. 

> 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. 

It has another importance in the strange world that corporate board
members live in. While they're getting money from VSI, they can make a
case that they're exploiting the OpenVMS intellectual property. If they
open-source it, a case can be made by shareholders *and their lawyers*
that they're discarding an asset. 

Remember, when Sun decided to open-source Solaris, they were under the
impression that it would make the Solaris business more profitable /for
them/. Their grounds for this have never been clear and it didn't work
out for them at all. HPE aren't going to follow that example. 

> They'd probably be willing to accept accept a lump sum to transfer the
> copyrights and walk away.

Yes, but it would be quite a large lump sum. 

> 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.

Quite probably. 

John