[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[David Goodwin]

On Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 1:37:16 PM UTC+12, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 4/25/2022 10:06 PM, David Goodwin wrote: 
> > 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. 

Yeah, I guess that really is the bigger issue. There is never any guarantee I'll
have access to OpenVMS beyond the end of my current community license. So
I'm never going to invest more time and effort into OpenVMS than I'd be willing
to loose should VSI decide to discontinue community licenses for some reason.

> > 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.

I guess the Solaris path is the best worst case scenario. The owner is abandoning
it so the community and a few small companies have taken up maintenance. If you 
absolutely had to run something that looks like Solaris beyond Oracles end of support
date then Illumos is there. Though I imagine anyone with source code will probably 
just port to Linux if they haven't already.

At the moment you don't have this option if/when support for OpenVMS ends. You're
either stuck on an unsupported and unmaintained platform (if you managed to get
a permanent license) or you're forced to port to something else very quickly.

Perhaps if the source was available under suitably open terms then having to renew
your VSI OpenVMS licenses every year would be less of a business risk because worst
case scenario if VSI stops renewing licenses you don't suddenly loose access to
OpenVMS forever. You just loose access to the VSI supported version of OpenVMS.

> > 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.

I'm not so sure Windows is doing fine in the server space. Microsoft runs more
instances of Linux in Azure than Windows, they've added Linux binary compatibility
to Windows and they've ported a bunch of their server software to Linux.

To me it kind of seems like Microsoft has realized Linux and cloud services will 
eventually replace Windows Server and they don't want their other products to go 
down with the ship.

> > 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. 

Yes, too many equate open source with no cost. Companies depending on open
source projects really need to contribute in some way - either financially or by
helping out with maintenance.