[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[John Dallman]

In article <tsrmfk$b8i$1 at reader2.panix.com>,
cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:

>     Establishment of a developer ecosystem, crowd-sourced fixes
>     for bugs, security auditing . . .

Can you be confident these things would happen? 

The VMS user community is mostly fairly old, and has habits built around
getting their OS from someone else. Their skills are stronger in
application programming than systems programming, and there's much more
of a distinction between those styles on VMS than on UNIX/Linux. VMS
application programming tends to use different languages (Basic, COBOL,
Fortran) from systems programming (Macro, BLISS, C). 

People from the wider open source community would be facing an alien
environment that uses weird programming languages. They'd also have to
work with plenty of people who think things were better when DEC was
around. 

It seems likely to me that an open source VMS would not develop a large
enough community to keep it going. Plenty of open source projects fail.

John