[Info-vax] Comment on the future of OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:

> If HP wanted to sell VMS, would Oracle be willing to buy it?


VMS's only remaining commercial value is the support revenues from the
remaining installed base. HP's own Gartner study did mention that VMS
customers do not have much loyalty to HP and may switch to any other
vendor as they move off VMS.

HP will milk VMS support revenues until it is dry. And they may even get
a small percentage who move from VMS to some HP systems.

There is no reason for HP to sell VMS. And with a scaled down el-cheapo
VMS maintenance team in India, they don't have to spend much to be able
to continue to sell lucrative support contracts.


And from a buyer's point of view, there is no reason for anyone to buy
VMS anymore. There might have been when VMS had a whole slew of very
valuable engineers and people like Sue who knew the customers personally.

However they've all been replaced by commodity drones with just a
handful of experienced people left. So there is no value left in it.

Much of the IP in VMS was already given away/donated by Bob GQ Palmer to
both Oracle and Microsoft, and HP clearly chose to not implement these
technologies in HP-UX when it abandonned to implement stuff like
clustering from True64 (which came from VSM).

Sorry to dash your hopes, but VMS will remain with HP until it is small
enough to be sold off to some small outfit, just like PDP11 stuff had
been sold off to mentec. And it will be a couple more years before it
happens.