[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[chrisq]

On 1/6/24 23:42, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <uncc5u$ns66$2 at dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>> On Sat, 6 Jan 2024 10:47:11 -0500, bill wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/5/2024 9:38 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>
>>>> For what I mean by “workstation”, look at the capabilities of the Unix
>>>> workstations in the 1980s/1990s: remember, they ran the same OS as
>>>> their respective companies’ server offerings, with all the same
>>>> capabilities. It was Microsoft that came along and offered a
>>>> “Workstation” OS that had cut-
>>>> down capabilities compared to their “Server” offering, so they could
>>>> charge less for the former ... and more for the latter.
>>>
>>> Not sure I agree with this at all.  It's been a long time and my memory
>>> may not be what it once was but I distinctly remember the only
>>> difference between NT Server and NT Workstation was Registry Settings.
>>
>> You are remembering NT 3.51, I think it was, when somebody discovered
>> that, indeed, all it took was a single Registry setting change to enable
>> “Server” functionality on an NT “Workstation” installation.
>>
>> Microsoft fixed that in the next version. Remember, it was not in their
>> interests to allow this sort of thing to continue, given the significant
>> difference in price between the two products.
>>
>> So you see, on the Unix side, the vendors never thought to charge any
>> different for the "workstation" versus "server" software, because it was
>> the exact same software, with the exact same capabilities.
> 
> I remember pretty specifically maximum user limits on versions
> of commercial Unix.  Most of the time it didn't matter for a
> workstation, where only one user at a time (generally) was
> logged into the machine.  For servers and timesharing hosts?
> It was a big deal.
> 
>> Today, the only OS in widespread use with this commonality of function
>> across disparate hardware configurations is Linux.
> 
> Or FreeBSD.  Or OpenBSD.
> 
> 	- Dan C.
> 

Been running FreeBSD for years now, Works out of the box on various
architectures and a base install takes  around 20 minutes. Ditched
Linux as it became more bloated and especially, the systemd trainwreck,
which I saw as a power grab by RedGat. Gross amount of complexity added
for no good reason. Having said that, have Suse and xubuntu installed
on a couple of machines, for software compatability testing reasons.
Always liked Suse Linux in the past, but again systemd, the disease
that has infected so many Linux distros.

As for licensing, and having been around many vendor's unix offerings
for decades, the only onerous licensing was associated with third
party apps, where a license manager needed to be installed to run
the app. Embedded C cross compilers, real time os, and tools,for
example.

With Sun, the os came with the machine and you could do more or
less what you wanted to do with it. A full set of tools and basic C
compiler out of the box. If you had the hardware, the os revision
for that hardware release was perpetually licensed. Compared to a
greedy DEC, some still wonder why Sun became so successful...

Chris