On 2022-04-25, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>
>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>> their long-term income.
>>
>
> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
> just walk?
>

The evidence coming out of France is that VSI are indeed allowing the
customers to walk away rather than addressing the concerns of those
customers when it comes to the time-limited production licences.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

On 4/26/2022 7:04 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 4/25/22 22:37, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-04-22, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> On 4/22/2022 1:46 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I keep wondering if VSI has gone for a policy of short-term income at
>>>>> the expense of damaging long-term income and I hope that isn't the case.
>>>>
>>>> They have obviously intended the opposite: they want to convert
>>>> short term one time revenue to long term recurring revenue.
>>>>
>>>> How it actually works out is to be seen.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>> their long-term income.
>>>
>>> Simon.
>>>
>>
>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>> just walk?
>>
>
> Are you saying that VSI would give some people a better deal while the
> majority would be stuck with the original plan? You don't think that
> would drive them away?
>
> bill
>

Standard customer rules:

1) The customer is always right.

2) When customer is wrong, refer to rule #1.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 8:11 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-04-25, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>> their long-term income.
>>>
>>
>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>> just walk?
>>
>
> The evidence coming out of France is that VSI are indeed allowing the
> customers to walk away rather than addressing the concerns of those
> customers when it comes to the time-limited production licences.
>
> Simon.
>

How many customers have walked away? Can you name even one?

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>>
>> (snip)
>>
>>> As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it
>>> requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it
>>> has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first.
>>
>> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
>> (from them) out of production hardware. I am not so sure when
>> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
>> by then.
>>
>> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
>> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>>
>
> There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
> apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
> weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
> conclusion of basically "forget that!".
>
> Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
> writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
> required bits and knowledge are freely available.
>
> For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
> that such an emulator would require.
>
> Simon.
>

If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist.
Don't need no stinkin itanic.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/22 10:45, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 4/26/2022 7:04 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 4/25/22 22:37, Dave Froble wrote:
>>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>> On 2022-04-22, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>>> On 4/22/2022 1:46 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I keep wondering if VSI has gone for a policy of short-term income at
>>>>>> the expense of damaging long-term income and I hope that isn't the
>>>>>> case.
>>>>>
>>>>> They have obviously intended the opposite: they want to convert
>>>>> short term one time revenue to long term recurring revenue.
>>>>>
>>>>> How it actually works out is to be seen.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>>> their long-term income.
>>>>
>>>> Simon.
>>>>
>>>
>>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts,
>>> just
>>> declared "no, we won't accept that"?  Do you really think VSI would
>>> let them
>>> just walk?
>>>
>>
>> Are you saying that VSI would give some people a better deal while the
>> majority would be stuck with the original plan?  You don't think that
>> would drive them away?
>>
>> bill
>>
>
> Standard customer rules:
>
> 1) The customer is always right.
>
> 2) When customer is wrong, refer to rule #1.
>

Where's the tongue-in-cheek emoji?
You can't possibly be that naive.

If that were true we would still be buying from DEC or at the very
least HP would still be pushing VMS.

bill

On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>>>
>>> (snip)
>>>
>>>> As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it
>>>> requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it
>>>> has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first.
>>>
>>> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
>>> (from them) out of production hardware. I am not so sure when
>>> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
>>> by then.
>>>
>>> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
>>> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>>>
>>
>> There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
>> apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
>> weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
>> conclusion of basically "forget that!".
>>
>> Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
>> writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
>> required bits and knowledge are freely available.
>>
>> For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
>> that such an emulator would require.
>>
>> Simon.
>>
>
> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist.
> Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>

Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
that Alpha cannot be used for.

Of course, that ceases to be a problem once everything, including
building VMS itself (and the compilers), is running natively on x86-64 VMS.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> On 4/26/2022 8:11 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-04-25, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>>> their long-term income.
>>>>
>>>
>>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>>> just walk?
>>>
>>
>> The evidence coming out of France is that VSI are indeed allowing the
>> customers to walk away rather than addressing the concerns of those
>> customers when it comes to the time-limited production licences.
>>
>> Simon.
>>
>
> How many customers have walked away? Can you name even one?
>

David, have you read _anything_ that Gerard has posted ???

French users who _want_ to stay with VMS are being pushed away from
VMS by the VSI licencing and the utter unwillingness of VSI to engage
with the French users in any meaningful way that addresses their
concerns.

That's just one set of users who have chosen to speak to VSI as
a group and to brief the community on the results of those discussions.

I can only imagine just how badly this licencing decision is being
thought of privately elsewhere. In summary, users are going to have
serious issues with allowing the continued working of their systems
to be tied to VSI staying in business.

After all, those users have their own continued employment and pensions
to think of.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

On 4/26/2022 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>>>>
>>>> (snip)
>>>>
>>>>> As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it
>>>>> requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it
>>>>> has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first.
>>>>
>>>> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
>>>> (from them) out of production hardware. I am not so sure when
>>>> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
>>>> by then.
>>>>
>>>> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
>>>> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>>>>
>>>
>>> There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
>>> apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
>>> weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
>>> conclusion of basically "forget that!".
>>>
>>> Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
>>> writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
>>> required bits and knowledge are freely available.
>>>
>>> For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
>>> that such an emulator would require.
>>>
>>> Simon.
>>>
>>
>> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist.
>> Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>>
>
> Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
> that Alpha cannot be used for.

I don't see anything like that?

What can itanic do that Alpha cannot? It's a shared code base.

> Of course, that ceases to be a problem once everything, including
> building VMS itself (and the compilers), is running natively on x86-64 VMS.
>
> Simon.
>

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 12:12 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 4/26/22 10:45, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 4/26/2022 7:04 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 4/25/22 22:37, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>> On 2022-04-22, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>>>> On 4/22/2022 1:46 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I keep wondering if VSI has gone for a policy of short-term income at
>>>>>>> the expense of damaging long-term income and I hope that isn't the case.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> They have obviously intended the opposite: they want to convert
>>>>>> short term one time revenue to long term recurring revenue.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> How it actually works out is to be seen.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>>>> their long-term income.
>>>>>
>>>>> Simon.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>>>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>>>> just walk?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Are you saying that VSI would give some people a better deal while the
>>> majority would be stuck with the original plan? You don't think that
>>> would drive them away?
>>>
>>> bill
>>>
>>
>> Standard customer rules:
>>
>> 1) The customer is always right.
>>
>> 2) When customer is wrong, refer to rule #1.
>>
>
> Where's the tongue-in-cheek emoji?
> You can't possibly be that naive.
>
> If that were true we would still be buying from DEC or at the very
> least HP would still be pushing VMS.
>
> bill
>

I didn't say that a particular vendor would survive.

I did seem to imply that if customers were not satisfied, a vendor could perish.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 1:21 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 4/26/2022 8:11 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-04-25, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>>>> their long-term income.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>>>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>>>> just walk?
>>>>
>>>
>>> The evidence coming out of France is that VSI are indeed allowing the
>>> customers to walk away rather than addressing the concerns of those
>>> customers when it comes to the time-limited production licences.
>>>
>>> Simon.
>>>
>>
>> How many customers have walked away? Can you name even one?
>>
>
> David, have you read _anything_ that Gerard has posted ???

Yes, I have. Now address my question. Can you name one VMS customer that
intended to stay on VMS but then walked away because of the licensing? Not
someone complaining. Someone who actually walked away.

There is ALWAYS a minimum of two sides to every story, and frankly, I'm not sure
just what Gerald has been trying to say. It seems as if he's contradicting all
of my conversations with VSI.

> French users who _want_ to stay with VMS are being pushed away from
> VMS by the VSI licencing and the utter unwillingness of VSI to engage
> with the French users in any meaningful way that addresses their
> concerns.

So says one side.

> That's just one set of users who have chosen to speak to VSI as
> a group and to brief the community on the results of those discussions.
>
> I can only imagine just how badly this licencing decision is being
> thought of privately elsewhere. In summary, users are going to have
> serious issues with allowing the continued working of their systems
> to be tied to VSI staying in business.

I do agree with the issue.

> After all, those users have their own continued employment and pensions
> to think of.

And VSI doesn't?

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

In article <t49191$f4j$1@dont-email.me>, davef@tsoft-inc.com (Dave Froble)
wrote:

> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already
> exist. Don't need no stinkin itanic.

For many purposes, sure, although building on an emulator is going to be
slow. However, all the cross-tools that are currently only runnning on
Idsel (I prefer that to Itanic) would have to be got going there. The
stuff that uses LLVM would be a problem, since that has not had an Alpha
backend for a long time.

John

In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743-b466-a5ae1599aa38n@googlegroups.com>,
David Goodwin <dgsoftnz@gmail.com> writes:

> But I don't see that happening. Too risky, too hard. And I suspect many
> OpenVMS users would rather see the platform go extinct than be
> open-sourced.

If VMS were open source, it wouldn't work. Many point out the
differences between VMS and other operating systems. One of them is
that if open source works for some, it doesn't necessarily work for all.

The main problem is the lack of perpetual licenses.

In article <t47lt0$1pi$1@dont-email.me>, Dave Froble
<davef@tsoft-inc.com> writes:

> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
> just walk?

It depends on how many there are and whether they would really walk if
VSI stood firm.

On 4/26/2022 3:10 PM, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <t49191$f4j$1@dont-email.me>, davef@tsoft-inc.com (Dave Froble)
> wrote:
>
>> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already
>> exist. Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>
> For many purposes, sure, although building on an emulator is going to be
> slow. However, all the cross-tools that are currently only runnning on
> Idsel (I prefer that to Itanic) would have to be got going there. The
> stuff that uses LLVM would be a problem, since that has not had an Alpha
> backend for a long time.
>
> John
>

If you're referring to the cross compilers for x86, that's rather short term,
and native compilers would replace them. In John we trust ...

If something else, be specific.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/22 15:12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <t47lt0$1pi$1@dont-email.me>, Dave Froble
> <davef@tsoft-inc.com> writes:
>
>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>> just walk?
>
> It depends on how many there are and whether they would really walk if
> VSI stood firm.
>

The bad side of all this is I expect no one is going to publicly
state they are leaving because of this. I expect that options other
than VMS will be looked at and projects to move away from VMS will
be started. The move will only become apparent when they fail to
renew their licenses and by then it will be much too late to fix it.

bill

In article <t49j2p$9f6$1@dont-email.me>, davef@tsoft-inc.com (Dave Froble)
wrote:

> If you're referring to the cross compilers for x86, that's rather
> short term, and native compilers would replace them. In John we
> trust ...

I was.

John

On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 8:28:10 PM UTC+12, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743...@googlegroups.com>,
> dgso...@gmail.com (David Goodwin) wrote:
>
> > OpenSolaris is still being actively maintained and enhanced under
> > the name Illumos. There are a variety of Illumos distributions
> > to choose from, Joyent use Illumos as the basis for their cloud
> > platform (SmartOS), and there is some NAS product that uses it too.
> Not all that widely used, though. My employers provided several products
> for SPARC Solaris for decades, and phased it out because Oracle were
> making less and less sense. Never had any customer interest in Illuminos,
> or even Solaris x64 when that was still going. All the plausible
> customers for that just went to Linux.

Yeah, Illumos isn't popular or widely used. But its also not dead - something
Solaris and OpenVMS will both be in a decade or two. Possibly Illumos
would be more widely used if Oracle had chosen OpenSolaris as the path
forward rather than trying to make it proprietary again. But the other challenge
to OpenSolaris being popular is its close enough to Linux that its probably hard
to justify choosing it over the more popular alternative.

Here a hypothetical open source OpenVMS has a better chance. Porting
to Linux is going to take a lot of effort so as long as the future of OpenVMS is
secure a lot of businesses aren't going to bother. And the current VSI
licensing strategy is a pretty big threat to the platforms long term
viability.

> > Meanwhile the closed-source variant of Solaris will probably
> > disappear when support for 11.4 ends in 2034.
> Certainly will.
> > This is probably the only realistic path forward for OpenVMS that
> > doesn't see it managed into extinction. If it were open-sourced
> > then the rest of the industry might pay it some attention, perhaps
> > a community might form and pick up some of the maintenance and
> > porting burden. It might get used in some new products and solutions.
> > Existing users would have less of a reason to abandon it. And VSI
> > would be uniquely positioned to provide support to commercial users.
> Quite possibly, but don't forget that VSI don't own OpenVMS. They have a
> license from HPE to maintain, support and upgrade it, but they don't own
> the intellectual property. They don't have the ability to open its source.
> HPE seem most unlikely to spend the lawyer-years required to get all the
> rights clear.

This one I imagine is pretty easy to deal with at this point. HPE has no
further use for OpenVMS - its only remaining value is in whatever fees they're
collecting from VSI. They'd probably be willing to accept accept a lump sum
to transfer the copyrights and walk away.

But managed decline is probably a safer bet than paying a pile of money to
open-source it. They'll make some amount of money for a decade or two.
Then they'll end maintenance and support but perhaps continue to renew
licenses for a while longer until the number of remaining customers isn't
worth it then they'll abandon OpenVMS and the platform will go extinct.

On Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 7:11:54 AM UTC+12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743...@googlegroups.com>,
> David Goodwin <dgso...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > But I don't see that happening. Too risky, too hard. And I suspect many
> > OpenVMS users would rather see the platform go extinct than be
> > open-sourced.
> If VMS were open source, it wouldn't work. Many point out the
> differences between VMS and other operating systems. One of them is
> that if open source works for some, it doesn't necessarily work for all.
>
> The main problem is the lack of perpetual licenses.

I don't see any sensible explanation for why having access to the source
code is a bad thing or why it couldn't work for OpenVMS. If you're worried about
some hidden security vulnerability then those exist whether the source is public
or not. Closed source for security reasons is nothing more than quite a bad
implementation of security through obscurity.

Perpetual licenses only solve the problem in the short term. Regardless of what
VSI does the customers they have today will over time leave (out of business,
whatever OpenVMS was doing is no longer needed, etc). VSI needs to win new
customers to replace those that leave. Perpetual licenses alone won't encourage
*anyone* to switch from Linux.

Closed source with perpetual licenses guarantees that one day it will no longer
be possible to buy new licenses. It guarantees that one day security updates
will no longer be available. It guarantees that one day when those hidden
security vulnerabilities are discovered no one will be legally allowed to fix them.

Den 2022-04-26 kl. 20:11, skrev Dave Froble:
> On 4/26/2022 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>> On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>> On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>>>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> (snip)
>>>>>
>>>>>> As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it
>>>>>> requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it
>>>>>> has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first.
>>>>>
>>>>> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
>>>>> (from them) out of production hardware.   I am not so sure when
>>>>> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
>>>>> by then.
>>>>>
>>>>> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
>>>>> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
>>>> apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
>>>> weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
>>>> conclusion of basically "forget that!".
>>>>
>>>> Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
>>>> writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
>>>> required bits and knowledge are freely available.
>>>>
>>>> For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
>>>> that such an emulator would require.
>>>>
>>>> Simon.
>>>>
>>>
>>> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist.
>>> Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>>>
>>
>> Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
>> that Alpha cannot be used for.
>
> I don't see anything like that?
>
> What can itanic do that Alpha cannot?  It's a shared code base.

You can lookup he SPD's or similar. There are a lot of tools
that are available on IA64 but not on Alpha.

I suspect that HP really doesn't care about enforcing it's licensing policy very much.
I just did a quick search of eBay and found 10 or so Digital and HP license PAKS being offered up for resale.

Crabs

On 4/26/2022 4:29 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 4/26/22 15:12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> In article <t47lt0$1pi$1@dont-email.me>, Dave Froble
>> <davef@tsoft-inc.com> writes:
>>
>>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts, just
>>> declared "no, we won't accept that"? Do you really think VSI would let them
>>> just walk?
>>
>> It depends on how many there are and whether they would really walk if
>> VSI stood firm.
>>
>
> The bad side of all this is I expect no one is going to publicly
> state they are leaving because of this. I expect that options other
> than VMS will be looked at and projects to move away from VMS will
> be started. The move will only become apparent when they fail to
> renew their licenses and by then it will be much too late to fix it.
>
> bill
>

I don't know any businessmen that are so passive. Most will get in a vendor's
face and let them know what they want.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 5:57 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2022-04-26 kl. 20:11, skrev Dave Froble:
>> On 4/26/2022 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>> On 4/26/2022 8:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>> On 2022-04-26, gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>>>>> On Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at 1:28:10 AM UTC-7, John Dallman wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> (snip)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> As an additional logistical point, open-sourcing VMS while building it
>>>>>>> requires using out-of-production Itanium servers would be suicidal: it
>>>>>>> has to be sustainable on commodity hardware first.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> DEC nicely released the 36 bit OS for us to use, though with only
>>>>>> (from them) out of production hardware. I am not so sure when
>>>>>> emulators came out, but it would not have been hard to write one
>>>>>> by then.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I suspect VAX is nicer to write an emulator for than Alpha or Itanium,
>>>>>> but all are possible to keep VMS running on new hardware.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> There are full system emulators for all architectures I am aware of
>>>>> apart from Itanium, which should tell you something. I once spent a
>>>>> weekend looking at the possibility of writing one, and came to the
>>>>> conclusion of basically "forget that!".
>>>>>
>>>>> Even with the initial help from Ski for the instruction set component,
>>>>> writing an Itanium emulator would be a massive job and not all the
>>>>> required bits and knowledge are freely available.
>>>>>
>>>>> For example, you can no longer freely download the Itanium firmware
>>>>> that such an emulator would require.
>>>>>
>>>>> Simon.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If emulators for building VMS is the issue, Alpha emulators already exist.
>>>> Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
>>> that Alpha cannot be used for.
>>
>> I don't see anything like that?
>>
>> What can itanic do that Alpha cannot? It's a shared code base.
>
> You can lookup he SPD's or similar. There are a lot of tools
> that are available on IA64 but not on Alpha.
>

You don't seem to be missing them ...

:-)

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 5:48 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
> On Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 7:11:54 AM UTC+12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
>> In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743...@googlegroups.com>,
>> David Goodwin <dgso...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> But I don't see that happening. Too risky, too hard. And I suspect many
>>> OpenVMS users would rather see the platform go extinct than be
>>> open-sourced.
>> If VMS were open source, it wouldn't work. Many point out the
>> differences between VMS and other operating systems. One of them is
>> that if open source works for some, it doesn't necessarily work for all.
>>
>> The main problem is the lack of perpetual licenses.
>
> I don't see any sensible explanation for why having access to the source
> code is a bad thing or why it couldn't work for OpenVMS. If you're worried about
> some hidden security vulnerability then those exist whether the source is public
> or not. Closed source for security reasons is nothing more than quite a bad
> implementation of security through obscurity.
>
> Perpetual licenses only solve the problem in the short term. Regardless of what
> VSI does the customers they have today will over time leave (out of business,
> whatever OpenVMS was doing is no longer needed, etc). VSI needs to win new
> customers to replace those that leave. Perpetual licenses alone won't encourage
> *anyone* to switch from Linux.
>
> Closed source with perpetual licenses guarantees that one day it will no longer
> be possible to buy new licenses. It guarantees that one day security updates
> will no longer be available. It guarantees that one day when those hidden
> security vulnerabilities are discovered no one will be legally allowed to fix them.
>

Ok, let's take a look at these claims ...

What guarantees that one day it will no longer be possible to buy new licenses?

What guarantees that one day security updates will no longer be available?

What guarantees that one day security vulnerabilities would not be legally fixable?

Please be specific in answering each of those questions. Frankly, I cannot
understand such guarantees.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 4/26/2022 2:11 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 4/26/2022 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-04-26, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>> Don't need no stinkin itanic.
>>
>> Read the original quote above. Itanium is currently used for things
>> that Alpha cannot be used for.
>
> I don't see anything like that?
>
> What can itanic do that Alpha cannot?  It's a shared code base.

10 year old Itanium systems are faster than 20 year
old Alpha systems.

VMS x86-64 cross compilers are only available on
Itanium.

Java 8 is only available on Itanium - Alpha
is left at Java 5.

Lots of VSI provided open source ports are
Itanium only including ActiveMQ and MariaDB.

So there are a few things.

Alpha is obviously more loved than Itanium, but ...

Arne

On 4/26/2022 7:04 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 4/25/22 22:37, Dave Froble wrote:
>> On 4/25/2022 1:20 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2022-04-22, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> On 4/22/2022 1:46 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I keep wondering if VSI has gone for a policy of short-term income at
>>>>> the expense of damaging long-term income and I hope that isn't the
>>>>> case.
>>>>
>>>> They have obviously intended the opposite: they want to convert
>>>> short term one time revenue to long term recurring revenue.
>>>>
>>>> How it actually works out is to be seen.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The alternative viewpoint is that their short-term aggressive licence
>>> policies could be scaring off VMS the customers who would have made up
>>> their long-term income.
>>
>> What if a number of VMS customers, currently with support contracts,
>> just declared "no, we won't accept that"?  Do you really think VSI
>> would let them just walk?
>
> Are you saying that VSI would give some people a better deal while the
> majority would be stuck with the original plan?  You don't think that
> would drive them away?

Business is business.

Based on what VSI has actually said then it seems highly likely.

Quote from Terry Holmes:

<quote>
Having said the above, we do recognize that there are specific
situations that are so important to human health and wellness that even
the idea of an expiring O/S license in a critical situation would not be
the “Right Thing” to do. Therefore, to those customers who may have
specific situations (i.e. nuclear plants, military armaments, local
infrastructure projects, other key government agencies that protect
their citizens, etc….), we will grant an exception to this policy and
allow VSI Perpetual licenses to be provided.
</quote>

Arne