[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <une6iq$12vd9$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>On 1/6/24 23:42, Dan Cross wrote:
>> [snip]
>> Or FreeBSD.  Or OpenBSD.
>
>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.

AIX licensing was a pain.

>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...

Ah SunOS.  In so many ways, the Unix par excellence.  It was sad
when they unbundled the C compiler and ditched the BSD kernel
with the switch to SVR4.  SunPro was not cheap.

I remember seeing the writing on the wall when a friend of mine
was showing me a Pentium PC: "It's about half the speed of a
SPARCstation-5, but a quarter of the cost."  Then they ditched
their core business to concentrate on Java standards.  That's
when it was obvious Sun was going to fail: it was just a matter
of time.

	- Dan C.