FreeVMS

I'm not convinced that it makes sense to keep the FreeVMS idea up. It just does not make sense: - OpenVMS is a mature environment. Maturity and obsolescense are tightly coupled, but one thing is sure right now: VMS is 24 years old, many of the ideas which influenced its design where intimately coupled to the computing style of the late 1970ies (Minicomputers, CISC, large systems etc.) - OpenVMS is complete. Reimplementing even only a limited subset of VMS would be a real ambitious effort. Reimplementing it in a portable way would be even harder, as the operating system is tightly coupled to the design of the DEC CPUs. - OpenVMS is completely different. It is not Unix with a funny command shell. It has logical names, asynchronous I/O and generic traps available to user programs, it has fat processes and a command interpreter in supervisor mode, it has logical names which are visible process-, job-, group or system-wide, it has fine-grained privileges, cluster-wide lock management, a file system with structured files, it has a structured command line with unified command and argument parsing, structured error messages etc etc. The whole power of VMS becomes visible only if the complete system is at your disposal. Porting Unix applications to VMS is usually a pain and I can see no sensible reason why one would want to write applications for an operating system which could, at best, reach the maturity of VMS 1.x in a few years from now. I can understand the urge to write an own operating system. Re-writing a proprietary or obsolete OS from the past would be the wrong way to enhance the world. We already see the pain one has to experience when being faced with Unix rewrites. If what you want is use the coolest operating system of the world, get a VAX or an Alpha and run OpenVMS. It's ready to use, it is complete and it is pretty cool. -Hans -- finger hans(a)huebner.org for details