HP/DEC/Compaq

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/

A sad day indeed. Although not entirely unexpected... I wonder how many VMS customers will take HP up on their suggestion that they port to NSK or HP-UX ? And will those two platforms last much longer ?

OMG.
That's some news indeed.

I have a customer (former employer) which relies quite heavily on OpenVMS. I guess they have to rewrite their plans now...

More to the point, how many customers will surround HP headquarters with burning torches, demanding Meg's head on a pike ?

You guys have got to quit letting these bastards pull this crap. The world will be intolerable if you keep allowing this kind of behavior.

This seems to have been HP's standard acquisitions policy for a while now (at least since Apollo). Spend a lot of money buying a company, discontinue their products at the earliest possible time, then expect the customers to move to HP's stuff. You'd think by now they'd figure out that it doesn't work that way.

Guess this means they'll never patch the y31086 problem

Well, that gives us a good few years to crack the license format and steal the source code...

Bastards. Like we need to be moving closer to a world of indistinguishable Unix derivatives.

The future of the Hobbyist Program concerns me even more, especially since they brought it back inside HP. It would be nice not to have to violate terms etc in order to get fresh PAKs and continue using these systems.

How many production OpenVMS boxes are really out there right now?

The Australian Stock exchange is a heavy user as are some banks I've come across in Australia and NZ.

R.

You best let them know they're going to have to migrate. Carly's payout is coming up soon and HP needs the cash. What with it being a high-tech service economy now and HP having to outsource all the development and jobs to India on account of costs and the fine management brought to you by Carly, Mark, and Meg, your little third-world stock exchange is just gonna have to suck up.

What, you thought HP's word was worth something ? ha ha ha, you fools !

You can pay by check, cash, or money order ...

Maybe they'll make OpenVMS, you know, "open."

Ha! I thought that was a good joke too.

^^

This ought to be stickied somewhere.

[/quote]

They're cheap.

Interesting juxtaposition: the buzz in the '80s was that we needed to have the UNIX derivatives more indistinguishable. The computer companies can't win, can they (not that they even tried, really - the "standardization" was mostly window-dressing, and the eventual move to Linux was because it was cheap).

I'm surprised that VMS wasn't discontinued earlier. HP never marketed it, as though it were just a legacy product, and it's been that way for many years now. Eventually HP-UX will also be discontinued, and they are apparently adding "high-availability" code into Linux to ease the transition. I guess Solaris will also probably be discontinued (although Oracle stays quiet about that subject), and then IBM will be the only major Unix vendor left.

Moves like this show the weakness and vulnerability that companies open themselves up to when they rely on proprietary software that can be discontinued at any time. The situation is the same with IRIX -- people can still find the media, but the company basically abandoned it, and it's unlikely to go open source in the future. It's mostly of interest as a legacy platform used by hobbyists, not a viable operating system for the future (which is unfortunate).

If HP wanted to succeed with VMS, they should have open sourced it and let the community take over the bulk of new development. My guess, though, is that they just wanted to get rid of the engineers and infrastructure costs associated with VMS. HP has been slowly becoming another Dell, and everything is probably made by Foxconn anyhow. Eventually even the management will be "outsourced" when the Chinese finally figure out that these companies are just "management shells" rather than manufacturers, and decide that they can do that part too.

Honestly, though, I don't mind the "world of indistinguishable Unix derivatives." Unix is a fine platform with many excellent qualities. I would much rather have standard open source Unix systems than a world beholden to Microsoft, or another proliferation of commercial Unix (with each system costing a small fortune).

I think Solaris will be around on high-end SPARC boxes a little while longer since there's a hell of a lot of money and maybe some ego tied up in SPARC (and that's some seriously GOOD hardware) but Linux is cheap and popular on x86. I guess Larry doesn't need the money from the Solaris ecosystem but it does help him sell Oracle DB and probably a bunch of app software.



I don't agree with this. VMS has been around longer than a lot of other OS open or closed. A few friends that have worked on it tell me it offers features the competition didn't and people and companies wouldn't have paid money for it all these years if they could get the features important to them for nothing. Any VMS customers on the forum here? I thought they did get the source when they changed the name to OpenVMS. Anyway it's not about open or closed but how good and marketable stuff is whether it's safe to use. Personally I work on a closed OS and hardware platform that's been around since 1964 and it's still a zillion dollar a year industry and nobody got screwed for using it. How long does something have to be in service before your "can be discontinued at any time" becomes irrelevant? How many new companies last more than a couple of years? How many companies started and went out of business since VMS 1.0 in 1978 and today?

If somebody is worried the vendor will go out of business they can write into the contract that they have to escrow the source. We have escrowed source more than once.

Just because something is open source doesn't mean companies will use it or pay money for it or should pay money for it. And it doesn't mean they can maintain it if the people they're relying on go out of business. If RedHat goes out of business does it really help the companies using RHEL and paying for service contracts that they could hire their own people to support it? It's usually not viable and most companies don't want to be in the IT business which is how this all started to begin with. A lot of people seem to think Linux is the answer to any question. Come back and talk to us when Linux has been in use in commercial/industrial settings as long as VMS and then we'll listen a little more. Until then...



No, if HP wanted to succeed with VMS they could have accomplished it without open sourcing it. They have the resources to do it. For most big companies business is just business and when Oracle bought Sun and got what they wanted it doesn't matter now to them if Solaris goes away, the Sun purchase already paid for itself. The same thing with VMS. It's too small a business for HP to worry about or they would have supported it better. They got the few sales and all the support contracts and it's paid for itself already.

Bottom line is today cheap is what matters. Personally, I remember the days when companies spent whatever it took to get the best stuff. Now everybody wants the cheapest stuff and it really doesn't matter if it's good bad or indifferent, as long as it doesn't make them bleed red on the next quarterly statement. In that kind of world good is hard to come by.

I've seen part of the source code to Ultrix and it was like clean and elegant well formatted poetry.
I don't recall ever seeing the source code VMS but I bet it is the same.
I've seen the source code to Linux and other open source projects and well.. enough said.

R.

"Proprietary" software has been discontinued a hell of a lot less and suppoorted a hell of a lot better than that open sores crap. At least if you get cheated by HP you know whom to go shoot. gtk1 gtk2 gtk3 qt wxwidgets soap ajax the foaming cleanser compiz dickwhizz, you name it, Linux has run through it. Support ? what a crock. It never worked right in the first place but we gots to release more ! faster ! release early release often, just like when you eat Messican food and have a lot of gas. Bugs ? hell, maybe someone else will catch them, not our biz mon ! We've got 80% market share, we must be doiing something right !

Barf.


People are stupid. Profit ! profit profit profit !! Business is all about profit !!

Yeah right. Then when the business goes tits-up it's the effing taxpayers who pay, while the ceo waltzes off with a few billion.

This stupid philosophy is destroying the foundations of the modern world.

Not to bash community efforts, but somebody pays for the heavy lifting of innovation. University or government projects. All the scaled up multiprocessor stuff that SGI paid for, XFS, JFS, yadda yadda. DEC spent good money supporting Linux on the Alpha, and porting to a 64 bit platform under that support really helped mature the kernel. Go ask John "Maddog" Hall about that.

No, HP's lack of vision and investment avoided success with VMS - perhaps with reason, based on customers and market trends, and perhaps not. But slashing your R&D budget below industry norms across the board is a more likely culprit...

VMS source has always been available for a price under the right agreement (for a while it was distributed on microfiche). The "silent Open" was added when they made changes to give POSIX compliance, and refers to open systems, not open source.

It's very solid, quite secure, and still is about the best clustering OS out there.

Open vs proprietary software: In the cathedral the bishop tells you what to do, and as long as the bishop knows what he's doing you'll have plenty of people keeping the foundations strong and cleaning out the sumps. In the bazaar it seems most of the people want to work on the glitzy fancy stuff, so you get 15 different UI toolkits that all somehow look very similar and yet the scheduler keeps a bug that can impact performance severely for a few years. Yes, FOSS stuff is amazing, but you'll note the best projects have a strong "bishop" (or would that be an elder?)

HP didn't help (and, indeed, this seems to be very common with their acquisitions - buy the company, keep their products on life support as long as you have to, then cancel them and wonder why the customers evaluate other options), but the VMS issues started with DEC back when they had all the OS confusion (VMS, OSF/1-DUNIX-Tru64, NT,Linux) and were (a) not seen as pushing UNIX or VMS (because they were pushing Alpha NT so much more) and (b) created the two lines of equipment that were essentially the same except for some being locked to Linux/NT only. Compaq/HP "kicked the neglect up a notch" but didn't start it. VMS has also been generally a more expensive option, with no cohesive "this is why you should consider VMS" strategy (the last attempt, the "exploding servers" publicity bit, didn't really build on VMS' strengths any more than Windows or Linux).

Which brings us back to the axiom that the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, so we get BDFLs like Guido and Larry.