[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Scott Dorsey]

Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>In article <k5crhdFroqeU1 at mid.individual.net>,
>Michael Kraemer @ home <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> wrote:
>>Dan Cross wrote:
>>> I'll be blunt: the only reasonable path for VMS to survive
>>> is to open source it under an OSI-approved license.  VSI
>>> should dedicated itself to finishing the x86_64 port and
>>> doing the necessary legal work to make that happen, and
>>> then pivot to consulting and services (honestly: this is
>>> what DEC should have done, and it's largely what IBM did
>>> in order to survive in the 00's).
>>
>>what exactly did IBM opensource in the 00's?
>>MVS? AIX? i? the Tivoli stuff?
>
>JFS, a bunch of stuff that went into Linux, etc, etc,
>etc.  More importantly, they embraced consulting and
>services, which arguably saved them.

It was a long time ago when T.J. Watson Jr. said that "IBM is not a 
computer company-- IBM is a business solutions company."  IBM really
never did make their billions selling hardware; if they were in the 
hardware business they would have been creamed by the competition.
They just made hardware for their business solutions.

IBM -did- provide a lot of support for the open source movement in
the post-2000 era.  But they also provided a lot of open source way
back in the seventies like the IBM Scientific Subroutines Package
which you could run on any computer (but which was optimized for the
360).
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."