[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/19/2023 4:39 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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.

Given that it happened in the past without open sourcing, then
that guarantee is not worth much.

>> 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.

The number of companies interested in taking over OS maintenance
is extremely small.

The vast majority of companies move off a platform if it
becomes EOL no matter if it is closed source or open source.

The theoretical possibility of taking on maintenance of let
us say 50 MLOC does not appeal to businesses.

Arne