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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/18/2023 9:49 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <tsrr9q$5qhq$4 at dont-email.me>,
> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 2/18/2023 4:47 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> In article <tsrfpl$4bfn$2 at dont-email.me>,
>>> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> 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:
>>>> But there are a few things to remember before
>>>> considering VSI going that path.
>>>>
>>>> 1) Redhat is doing fine delivering support service. But
>>>>      they may have done even better if they could also have
>>>>      charged real license fees, but they cannot because
>>>>      they mostly did not create the products and the products
>>>>      are typical under GPL or LGPL. VSI can and do sell
>>>>      licenses.
>>>
>>> RedHat got started when the commercial Unix vendors, who did
>>> charge for software, were still in their prime.  Which among
>>> them are still selling licenses?
>>
>> Most of them are still selling. Oracle is selling Solaris.
>> IBM is selling AIX. HPE is selling HP-UX. HPE is not selling
>> Tru64.
> 
> Literally every single one of those has been EOL'ed.
> Every. Single. One.

You can state that and sound totally convincing.

The problem is that everybody that know how to use
basic search on the internet can detect that it is
a lie.

AIX:

AIX 7.3. TL1 was released in December 2022.

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/aix-support-lifecycle-information 
states that IBM supports AIX 7.3 TL1 until end of 2025.

HP-UX:

There was an update to HP-UX 11iv3 in May 2022.

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/4AA4-7673ENW states that HPE supports 
HP-UX 11iv3 (on Integrity) until at least end of 2025.

Solaris:

Solaris 11.4 SRU53 was release in January 2023.

https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-301321.pdf 
says that Oracle will support Solaris 11.4 until
November 2021 / November 2034.

Do they have a future? No or probably not.

(HP-UX will die with Itanium, Oracle has clearly indicated that they
are putting much effort into Solaris, IBM did not invest in Redhat
to push AIX)

But they are not EOL today. And will not be for several years.

>> But that does not change that Redhat did not chose
>> to open source RHEL, JBoss etc. - it was already open
>> source and they did not have any way to close source it.
> 
> No, but no one could manage to do what RedHat did with a
> commercial Unix version.

In their days the commercial unixes did pretty well.

Arne