[Info-vax] Is it too late for VMS on x86-64 ?

[Neil Rieck]

On Friday, March 10, 2023 at 8:10:02 AM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> This place is completely and totally dead, even compared to the reduced 
> activity of 3-4 years ago. 
> 
> Where is everyone ? 
> 
> Has everyone finally been forced to leave VMS behind after each "porting 
> complete" target date came and went ? 
> 
> I am also aware that during the 8.5 years the port has been going on, 
> many VMS systems may have aged-out naturally as part of the normal 
> application development and replacement lifecycle. 
> 
> So what happened ? Where is everyone ? 
> 
> Simon. 
> 
> -- 
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
> Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

Answering your question, the answer is "no, it is not too late for VMS/OpenVMS on x86" although we all wished it could have happened sooner. That said, a better answer would be "it's complicated". Why?

A lot has happened since:
(1) HP signed the deal with VSI to continue development and support of VMS-OpenVMS (although HP/HPE supported it for at least 5 more years)
(2) HP split into HP and HPE
(3) HPE spun off (spin-merger) its software division with Microfocus. This resulted in HPE transitioning into a (mostly) hardware company
(4) IBM paid $34 billion to acquire Red Hat
(5) Microfocus was acquired by OpenText in 2023. [[[ so is HPE totally out of the software business? ]]]

Lots of people ignore item 4 but forget that IBM and DEC used to compete with each other, head-to-head, while manufacturing their own hardware and publishing their own software, which included operating systems. IBM continued to manufacture new CPU architectures (POWER8-9-10-11) and was paying Red Hat to make sure Linux ran on them. Intel was supporting Linux on Itanium until AMD changed the game by adding 64-bit support to x86 which forced Intel do do the same. After this event, Intel lost interest in Itanium leaving HP to continuing support on Linux. You can still see HP email addresses in the Linux kernel archives. This effort by HP employees seemed to stop in 2005. I can only assume this was a business decision by HP management.

So while HP/HPE was getting out of the software business, IBM never followed.

Meanwhile, while HP/HPE was walking away from software, their user community here remained steadfast. 

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
https://neilrieck.net/OpenVMS.html