[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Scott Dorsey]

John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>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? 

There are many, many open source operating systems where that never happened.
There are two very popular ones where it did.  Maybe three if you want to
count ReactOS.  Statistically speaking, your chances are not very good.

>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.

The vast majority of open source projects fail.  The good news is that
they are still usable and maintainable when they do, becase there is source.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."