[Info-vax] VMS survivability (was: Re: Rendez-vous autour de VMS" of January 31 2023 report)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/18/2023 4:01 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <tsrdl6$4bfn$1 at dont-email.me>,
> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 2/18/2023 3:20 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> In article <memo.20230218104100.11588B at jgd.cix.co.uk>,
>>> John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> In article <tsq2vo$3utev$1 at dont-email.me>, jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com
>>>> (Jan-Erik Söderholm) wrote:
>>>>> English version of the meeting notes:
>>>>
>>>> The license news is good. [snip]
>>>
>>> Meh.
>>>
>>> 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,
>>
>> The general assumption is that VSI can't do that as
>> they don't own VMS - HPE does.
> 
> Which is why they should start working with HPE now
> to make it happen.  Sun didn't own SVR4; AT&T did.
> Yet somehow OpenSolaris happened.

At that time the SCO group owned it.

But yes somehow they managed to make it happen.

Maybe SUN had some extra rights because they were
part of the development of SVR4. Maybe the fact that
SUN was way bigger than the SCO group made it easier. Or
something else.

But I suspect that VSI would pay more attention to the
business impact of the move than the IP aspects.

It did not work out business wise.

The open sourcing did not stop the decline of Solaris.

After a few years Oracle (that had bought SUN) moved back
to a closed source model.

And the open source version is something that practically
nobody use and very few can even remember the name of (I will
save people the wikipedia search - it is "illumos").

Open sourcing Solaris did not solve Solaris'es
problems.

Maybe it even made them worse.

Not a good example to provide to VSI.

Arne