Re: Anyone interested in building a vms-like OS?

In article <47a07b6d$0$15756$c3e8da3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
There is a huge difference between Linux and a FreeVMS.

Unix was gaining popularity and the proprietary vendors were marketing
it a lot. But the pesky issue of Unix licence/ownership left a door wide
open for a Linux that is un-incumbered by thoe licences to come out and
ride on the Unx train powered by the bug guys liek Sun. Linux benefited
from all the Unix marketing done by the proprietary unix vendors.

There were versions of Unix that were more free than Linux. The AT&T
lawsuit is yet another red-herring. development of BSD never stopped
and distribution while limited never really stopped either. Those of
us involved at the time knew there was little if any AT&T code left
in the stuff BSD gave away. The results of the lawsuit bore this out.
Linux got its start by riding the Stalman "All software must be free"
wave. And then it adopted a concept that we are all too familiar with.
Marketing. It had advocates who went out and hyped it to high heaven.
Got stupid (but effective) little articles in trade journals. It even
got its own magazine. No one in the BSD camp has ever even tried to
market it. If it had been the advertising by proprietary unix vendors
that was making Linux so successful then the various BSD's would have
been there right along side of them because they could always claim
the advertising applied more to them than Linux, but they didn't care
and never tried to ride any wave. It was marketing, pure and simple,
done by the Linux camp that made it what it is.


Linux jumped into a successful and viable bandwagon.


FreeVMS would be jumping onto train that is running out of steam. There
is no marketing of VMS,

And there you have it. The biggest problem VMS has and a real VMS clone
could fix that the same way that Linux did. The developers could start
giving interviews (unless you think that none of the trade rags would
even be willing to print it, I don't think so...) And, if it done
as I said as a reasonably priced, but not free, product there would soon
be money for paid advertising. It's not like we would be trying to sell
iceboxes to eskimoes. VMS has a very strong potential value, even if HP
can't or won't recognize it.

and VMS has left the IT consciousness.

So had IBM until Gerstner decided to save it.

People
don't consider VMS as an IT solution anymore.

And that's what the people running IBM thought in the early 90's.

While it would be very
easy for HP to market VMS, it would be very hard for volunteers to gain
any traction in the market on their own.

Linux hasn't had a problem getting into the press from the very beginning.
Other OpenSource projects (like MySQL) have also had no problem getting into
the trade rags no matter how little real value they have. Why would you
think that a VMS clone would be any different. I would actually think
there were major themes you could play up to, including the idea that
the owner of the original fails to see the value while people all over
the world are crying for it.



Unix is ugly.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. VMS can be pretty ugly, too.

But people who want "cute" get Ubuntu or Macs and still
get the power of unix under the hood.

Actually, most Mac fanatics get mad when you tell them it's just "unix
under the hood" even though I have seen place where Apple themselves flat
out claims it's just BSD 4.4.



For VMS to rejoin the IT crowd, it would need some fairly serious
updates of its middleware, and make it possible to "constantly" run
up-to-date versions of popular middleware such as GTK, KDE etc etc etc.
It is no longer enough to port it once. It has to be a constant effort,
which means that the VMS "#ifdef" have to be part of the mainstream
codebase otherwise, you end up having to re-port everything from scratch
with every patch/version.

Believe it or not, based on the mindset of the average OpenSource
geek, a version of VMS without a tie to HP would probably have no
problem getting itself incorporated into the codebase.


It would be great if HP were to decide to give VMS a development boost
instead of staff cuts. It wouldn't be unrealistic to see VMS brought
into the 21st century and be able to be modern again. But it is
unrealistic to expect HP to make such a decision.

And that is the reason for suggesting that now is the time to start
looking at doing a clone and doing it right. Not following the
broken "all software must be free" model and looking at a VMS clone
as a badly needed business solution.

But I hold little hope that any of this will go beyond this forum.

bill

--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
.

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