22 Oct
2013
22 Oct
'13
10:22 a.m.
On Oct 22, 2013, at 12:15 PM, David Griffith wrote:
On Tue, 22 Oct 2013, David Riley wrote:
That's an awfully big "if". They've outsourced most/all of their
VMS development and support to India, and reports I've heard are
not favorable about the performance of that group. HP has even
less idea of what to do with VMS than Compaq did; the OpenVMS
discussion group on LinkedIn (which is actually a pretty decent
bunch) had a thread a while back about trying to do a new
commercial installation of VMS and the terrible time they had
trying to get in touch with anyone at HP who even knew what
OpenVMS WAS. The end verdict was that the resellers and third-
party VMS service firms do the real support for HP, which means
that HP seldom sees a dime from it. The widespread perception
is that the only reason HP has supported it as long as it has
is because of government contracts; this is also suspected to
be the rationale behind the 2020 support commitment.
I don't generally like to be a downer, but I'm really not very
optimistic about the prospects of OpenVMS for the future, at
least as a non-vintage OS. It has a very enthusiastic group of
core supporters (Ian Miller, Sue Skonetski, etc) who have the
Sisyphean jobs of "VMS Evangelists" at HP, and the Hobbyist
program is very well run, so there is some hope that there are
enough people to convince HP management to Do The Right Thing,
even if it's a remote possibility.
- Dave
But yes, there are still plenty of VMS shops that
will continue
using it until it becomes financially infeasible to do so. That
will be a long time, since HP has committed to support until 2020,
but unless they change their minds (not bloody likely), it's coming.
I'm particularly sad that they made the decision not to support the
Poulson processors, since that's the first iteration of the IA64
architecture that I actually found compelling, and I know I'm not
the only one.
I think we'll find VMS doing billable work for a long time similarly to how PDPs are
still found doing billable work. If anyone high up at HP has any brains left, they'd
find some way to open-source as much of VMS as possible, preferably under a BSD-ish
license.