[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Dan Cross]

In article <memo.20230219101729.11588I at jgd.cix.co.uk>,
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? 

No, I can only say that they will happen with p between 0 and 1.

But I _can_ confidently say that they will NOT happen without
open-sourcing.

>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.

Here's the difference: if a company is sufficiently invested in
VMS and the source is out there, then they _can_ invest in the
talent and development environment necessary to take things on
themselves.  Is it a pain?  Yes.  But it's less of a risk than
relying on only a single source.

	 - Dan C.