Post by Richard JordanPost by Chris TownleyEnd of Alpha and I64 community licenses
Looks like a more restricted X86 - WE can download a pre-built and
licensed VMDK with a few LP, including compilers
Losing the Alpha option is my real pain point. Both my hobbyist systems
are Alphas (DS10 and PWS-600au).
The fact that they are summarily rejecting already submitted (but not
yet approved) requests quite frankly hurts.
The loss of Alpha (and Integrity, although far fewer people collected
Itanium hardware) is about as relevant/damaging as the loss of the VAX
hobbyist program: almost not at all.
It's trivial to generate your own licenses a number of ways, so you can
continue to use it in perpetuity. And since it was already pretty much
the "honor system" to not use your hobbyist licenses for commercial
purposes, I have no ethical or moral qualms with the idea of using
OpenVMS on VAX or Alpha for personal self-education and history of
computing hobbyist purposes.
The access to the software itself was already at the point where, like
VAX, it seemed frozen in time for historical systems. Even though VSI
is, to my understanding, providing occasional updates to commercial
Alpha customers, the version available on the community SFTP server has
been the same for quite a while. Which is fine: VMS on Alpha is mature,
stable software and for most permitted uses (hobbyist non-commercial
use), I wouldn't expect to drop a system out on the open internet, so
even a lack of security patches hasn't worried me.
Anyway, hypothetically my VAX and Alpha could continue to run for my own
fun for many years to come, and I almost feel like while of course they
can't say it / encourage it, VSI is unceremoniously dropping the Alpha
and Integrity community programs because they know the enthusiast
community will take care of themselves and hush-hush wink-wink while
keeping it going behind the scenes for those who are really interested.
The loss of real installation media and LP kits for x86, though, is the
big loss here. While the relevance of VMS for x86 was already
questionable for anything beyond being a lifeline for companies still
stuck on VMS for one reason or another (from a hobbyist perspective, a
ton of the fun software never even made the jump from Alpha to Itanium,
let alone from Itanium to x86), it was fun to imagine a potential uptick
in interest in VMS due to being able to run (somewhat) easily on
hardware everyone has. The idea of downloading a pre-installed OS disk
image is of zero interest to me, so VMS for x86 will just fade back into
the abyss from which it recently emerged.
I get why VSI doesn't want to bother with any of this, though. Their
business perspective makes sense. Nothing is going to generate new
business interest in OpenVMS. No software company is going to make a new
product for OpenVMS. The entire thing only exists to keep customers who
are stuck on it going, and at the moment there is still enough money
there to sustain a business on providing that legacy system to those
companies. Even the best community program in the world isn't going to
change the fact that greenfield development on OpenVMS just isn't going
to happen. Customers are using it to keep running their line-of-business
critical in-house BASIC programs that store data in Rdb, etc. So why
would VSI care about trying to make stuff that only hobbyists want work?
I do find it kind of funny, though, that apparently they thought lots of
open source projects would be inspired to put time and effort into
getting their code to work on VMS x86, a closed-source, proprietary
operating system, just because a non-commercial, non-perpetual,
hit-or-miss-whether-the-form-to-request-it-will-even-work-and-if-you'll-
ever-make-it-to-the-top-of-the-queue was available. If that's what they
thought the benefit of the community program was -- that they could get
other people to do work for free for them to turn around and use as
justification for customers to stay on their proprietary platform and
keep paying them to move forward on VMS for x86 -- then yeah, of course
that vision of the community program failed!
Alas, the history of computing is littered with significant, important
historical software fading away into the sunset because the current
ownership is responsible for profits, not historical preservation and
community sustainability. The good news in this case is that VMS across
all of its important architectures is very well preserved and we don't
need VSI or anyone else to keep it going among those who are truly
interested and passionate.
If any of the above seems overly harsh or pessimistic... well, yeah, I'm
reacting to disappointing news and am certainly in a mental state
reflecting that.
But I'm also a realist and this ain't my first rodeo.
-Matthew