Re: The possibility of vms opening up?

In article <1152568977.756411.238210@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "geletine" <adaviscg1@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Dave Froble wrote:

When VMS was initially produced, the prime reason was to sell VAX
computers. At that time the only reason computer companies produced
software was to sell hardware.


Microsoft continue to make an ever increasing bloated Os in order for
hardware vendors to make money , of course there are open sourse
alternatives that run on older computers, apart from games and the ever
increasing multimedia market for faster computers. So the issue still
continues.


Microsoft are not in the least concerned with making profits for hardware
vendors. They just want to resell you their software again and again.


Today is a bit different, with the hardware in many cases being a
commodity. A particular OS is not required in order to use commodity
hardware because there is a variety available to do that job.


It all depends on what market your selling to, certain products work on
certain Os.
In the work enviroment for instance, the os with the best value in
support and that users know would mostly likely be chosen. Open source
software and os support is on the ever increase.

Application support is probably the key discriminator.


VMS exists today to provide some unique capabilities. Possibly not as
unique as some believe, but still it has it's values. As a product, VMS
(should) produce profits for HP.

Hp surely can profit from support and selling more hardware and giving
away vms.

1) Why should HP give up such profits? Because you'd like them to?

if this was just for me, this would be a dead forum a long time ago,
Maybe I have not said enough, but profit can be made in support, or
customised applications or patches to suit the client. Novell work to
this goal by selling a corporate version with all the source, and a
free version for anybody with all source. The two versions cater to a
different markets.


Owning an OS or owning the hardware provides stable income from selling those
products and has also traditionally bought in even more money by the vendor
selling support.
Relying just on support is more dicey as Redhat may be about to find out
see http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32910
where Oracle boss Larry Ellison seems to be positioning himself to offer
support for Redhat customers.

There are lots of companies which specialise in hardware and software support
(as well as lots of the older commercial OS vendors HP, IBM etc which have
traditionally had their own support divisions). It is far from clear that the
Linux distribution vendors are the best people to provide support but that is
about the only large income stream they have.


2) As pointed out many times, the source listings are available. You
want them for free? Fine, I'd like my next Cadillac to also be free.
Actually, I'd like everything to be free.

source listings is not code source, if cars could be copied as simply
and cheaply as setting up storage space and bandwidth, which is already
part of the buisness and then freely available to the world to not just
take but to improve upon, without actually paying a wage then hell take
a car for all your friends and family.

As has been pointed out before there exist publicly available tools to convert
the source listings into compilable source code.
Giving those source listings away or compiling them into an OS and giving that
away however would breach HP's copyright.


I am not sure if you are aware
that Sun's latest OpenSPARC T1 is open source, yes thats not a lie, the
schematics are truelly availabe to anybody for zero payment.
Lets not forget most of solaris is open source, are Sun closing their
buisness?

Solaris is having to compete directly with Linux. Whether this gamble will work
is still to be decided.
However I can't see many Solaris using corporations apply patches to their
systems which haven't been blessed by SUN.

why not vms open at least some of the Os? Ok Sun have not yet opened
java, having said that there is a very good free version thats not
complete but progress is fast. And Sun have not complaind about it.
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/



What you haven't done is define what you mean by 'open', which means
entirely different things to different people, and you haven't made a
business case for HP to make an effort to do something that you want.


I mean open source , the source code being available, See above for the
buisness point of view.
I believe there will be a time in the future where not being open
source will kill a buisness, apart from a select few.


David Webb
Security team leader
CCSS
Middlesex University
.

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