[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Dan Cross]

In article <tsup8s$lhc9$1 at dont-email.me>,
Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>On 2/19/23 3:48 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <tst9dd$dhc4$1 at dont-email.me>,
>> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>
>You seem to be missing some context here and are assuming that open
>source on VMS has never been done, that porting open source *to* VMS has
>anything at all to do with the open sourcing *of* VMS itself, and that
>the latter has never been tried.  All of these are false assumptions.

You seem to misunderstand what I'm getting at, conflating
several distinct points into one.  Perhaps I am not explaining
it well.

Obviously there have been open source projects ported to VMS,
but I'm quite certain I never suggested otherwise.

There is an ongoing effort to port LLVM to VMS to get native
compiler support, but with the existing language front-ends in
addition to clang etc, correct?  Where is that work happening?
Is there an open source repository where an outside contributer
can work _on that port_?  If this is happening in the open, it
does not appear to be in the LLVM repository.
(for ref: https://groups.google.com/g/llvm-dev/c/MYfZW2DOU2I/m/q8oDU0UTAAAJ
and https://llvm.org/devmtg/2017-10/slides/Reagan-Porting%20OpenVMS%20Using%20LLVM.pdf)

Similarly with contributions to the operating system itself.
ARM is gaining ground in the server space, and it seems that a
VMS port to ARM is likely at some point, if VMS survives.  How
does an independent third-party contribute to that, beyond just
asking VSI?  As Arne said earlier, VMS needs things to be done,
but what if those things require, or would be significantly
aided, by open sourcing the OS or large parts of the
infrastructure?  For example, independent security researchers
have contributed significantly to finding and fixing security
flaws in important projects by examining the source code for
projects (e.g., Linux, OpenBSD, etc).  But since generally
speaking they don't have access to VMS source code, they simply
cannot do this.

Separately, there is the issue of enticing open source software
maintainers to port to VMS.  Here, I agree that it is not
necessary for VMS to be open source to make this happen (and in
fact, if one goes back and rereads my posts on this I'm
confident one will find I did not suggest this, though people
like Arne obviously assumed that I did).

However, there does need to be some kind of incentive: why
should anyone port to a niche platform with a dubious future?
Here's where it becomes relevant that VMS is only supported by a
single, small company.  Furthermore, that those project
maintainers may not even have an adequate compiler for the
target language: Itanium VMS C++ is stuck at C++'03 apparently,
so someone wtih a C++ project that uses any features from C++'11
on will either have to back out those features, or make them
conditional on compilation target, both of which imposes a
substantial burden for no particular benefit to the project
maintainer.  Without that native clang++ port, which they don't
seem to be able to contribute to as prerequisite, the upside for
the OSS folks to port to VMS just doesn't seem to be there.

Indeed, this generalizes to any software vendor, commercial or
open source.

If open-sourcing VMS has been tried, then can anyone share the
story?  And note the context now: just because it didn't work
before doesn't mean it can't be done now.

	- Dan C.