[Info-vax] Real live example...

[Scott Dorsey]

Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>>David Goodwin  <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>The only guarantee of a future is for the source to be made available under
>>>a worthwhile license. Without the source there are no long-term guarantees.
>>
>>This is likely true, but how are you going to convince someone at HPE of this?
>>It's not like VSI has any choice in the situation.
>
>This is why I mentioned Sun earlier, though most people seemed
>to utterly miss the point by fixating on Sun's eventual failure.
>But the critical observation was Sun was able to do this with
>Unix, which seemed like an impossible task at the time...until
>it actually happened.

I'm not sure what you mean here.  Sun did release an open-source version of
Solaris 2, but that was because they actually saw a market and were already
putting considerable effort into maintaining the OS.  (And there was really
no SysV code left in Solaris 2 at that point.)

The problem is that nobody at HPE cares about VMS and they don't care enough
to do anything with it, like the effort to release it as open source.  VSI
cares about VMS, but they don't have any rights to do anything like that.

>So there is precedent.

I don't see the situations as even vaguely related.  But feel free to get
on the phones and call HPE and suggest that they open-source VMS.  But first
you'll have to find someone at HPE who knows what VMS actually is.

While you're at it, feel free to call someone at Oracle and ask them to 
open-source SunOS 4.1.4.  If you can actually get someone to understand 
that SunOS is different than Solaris you'll have got farther than anyone else 
ever has.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."