HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist license program is closing

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 3:48 AM Peter Corlett via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote

> > 2. Declare that we need to develop an open replacement.
>
> There is FreeVMS, but there also doesn't seem to have been any progress on
> it
> in the last decade and its domain has been lost and taken over by a
> squatter.
>
> Writing an operating system is *hard*, way beyond a weekend's hacking
> which is
> how most open source projects get going. Cloning an existing one is
> doubly-so
> because it has to be bug-compatible.
>
> Linux has taken thirty years to get this far. It's arguable what is
> "major" but
> to a rough approximation, there are no good open source clones of other
> operating systems of similar complexity: I'm aware of FreeDOS, AROS,
> EmuTOS and
> a few others, but they're relatively simple.
>

Linux never was a thing on the VAX that was very good. It was too late in
its life cycle to get enough love.

Linux and/or NetBSD/vax would be a good choice, though, to implement the
VAX's system calls and execute it's binaries. Though there were more
concerted efforts to do this years ago, but I don't know what became of
them. Google shows a smattering of efforts littered with broken links. :(

Warner