[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Dan Cross]

In article <tst9dd$dhc4$1 at dont-email.me>,
Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>On 2/18/2023 10:06 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <tsrpoc$5qhq$2 at dont-email.me>,
>> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>> On 2/18/2023 5:08 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>>> In article <tsrf3b$4krc$1 at dont-email.me>,
>>>> Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>>> What benefits do you imagine for VSI, for customers,
>>>>> if VSI were to do what you suggest.  Talking about
>>>>> the "open source" issue.
>>>>
>>>> Establishment of a developer ecosystem, crowd-sourced fixes for
>>>> bugs, security auditing,
>>>
>>> That all sounds very nice.
>>>
>>> But how does it work for the VMS stuff that are already
>>> open source?
>>>
>>> I can tell you: two handful of people are doing all the
>>> work.
>> 
>> Yes.  Because there is no incentive for anyone else, because VMS
>> is clinging to an antiquated closed model and maintainers see it
>> as a dead platform.  Do you not see that as a problem?
>> 
>>> It is problematic to find people to maintain the ifdefs
>>> and build scripts of for VMS in many open source projects.
>> 
>> Have you ever stopped to wonder why that is, and how one might
>> go about changing it?
>
>It is not obvious to me why VMS being open source should
>make it more attractive to develop open source on VMS.

It's prohibitively expensive to do so today.  Should commercial
vendors port to OpenVMS using the hobbyist program?  How about
open source vendors?

>There is no (non-religious) reason for an open source developer
>to not develop open source on a closed source OS.

Cost.

>Back in the days the commercial Unix'es did not seem
>to have a problem attracting open source developers.

That was then.  Commercial Unix is dead.  Ok, all-but-dead, to
satisfy the pedants who seem incapable of seeing the big picture
instead of arguing the finer points of the details ad nauseum.

>Back in the same days a lot of free stuff (which today
>would have gotten an open source license slapped on)
>was available for VMS - VMS SIG tapes and L&T SIG tapes
>were full of such stuff. VMS not being free did not
>prevent that.

That was then, this is now.  Back then, Linux didn't exist and
hardware was expensive; it made sense to port to whatever
proprietary platform you were on because switching was a major
capital investment.  These days, I could spin up a virtual
machine on my desktop in a matter of minutes, so what's the
point?

>The Java world (here I am going with Bjarne's "Java isn't
>platform independent; it is a platform") saw a flood
>of open source before OpenJDK.

Non-sequitur.

>Open source simply requires people developing
>open source.

...which requires an incentive, which no one has for VMS.  Very
few people in the open source world are running it, so why would
they develop for it?  What incentive does anyone have to develop
for a closed proprietary platform controlled by a single, small
company?

>A couple of well known quotes:
>
>Benjamin Franklin - Well done is better than well said
>
>John F Kennedy - Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you 
>can do for your country

So I know a lot about OS implementation on x86, but have no
practical way to contribute to getting OpenVMS running.  Oh
well.

>VMS does not need people that say:
>- VSI please open source VMS
>- someone please port GNAT to VMS
>- someone please port Rust to VMS
>- someone please port XYZ to VMS
>
>VMS need people that say:
>- I have ported XYZ to VMS
>- I have created ABC on VMS

How, pray tell, is one going to cooperate in, say, porting GNAT
or Rust or LLVM to VMS, when all that development is being done
in a highly proprietary context that by its very nature
precludes collaboration?  Suppose somebody finds a latent bug in
the OS that's tickled by the new compiler; how does one help get
that fixed without the source code?  Sure, provide a really good
bug report, but none of that helps people do what you claim VMS
needs above.

	- Dan C.