HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist license program is closing

[Antonio Carlini]

On 11/03/2020 21:24, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2020, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote:
>> Bob Supnik got Unisys to release the sources to BTOS while he was
>> VP of engineering, but we've never been able to find a copy of them.
>> They outsourced support to India, and all traces to what happened to
>> the software have vanished.
>
> So, in addition to many companies being reluctant to release rights to 
> IP, a lot of stuff is just lost without a trace. 


Yup.

Parts of the DEC Networking group got sold to Cabletron and then bits 
transitioned to Riverstone. Later VAX/PSI code made it as far as the US 
engineering team (who by then were part of EDS iirc). I don't know 
whether a copy of the DECnis code stayed with DEC - the copy with 
Riverstone wouldn't have gone any further (there were big layoffs 
involved so I doubt that anyone was checking that nothing vanished). 
More or less the same will be true for the Riverstone code. Some of it 
may have survived the fire sale a few years later but I suspect tracking 
any of that down might be hard to impossible.

The code I wrote at BlueARC is still going at Hitachi Vantara but the 
long-dead Si7500 code may no longer be on anyone's disks there. It was 
preserved on a set of DVD-ROMs (as part of the regular backup regimen) 
but the guy who handled that has left and there is probably little 
incentive to make sure it hasn't slipped through the cracks.

At least in the open source world (where I now work) most things are in 
a github repo. Admittedly those things do vanish every now and then but 
at least you have the chance to grab something now if you think it will 
be useful. Although given how interconnected things are these days, 
building something in 2030 that last built on today's Ubuntu 19.10 (or 
whatever) may require more effort than you think it is worth ... but at 
least you'll have the source code.


Antonio


-- 
Antonio Carlini
antonio at acarlini.com