VMS Software Prunes OpenVMS Hobbyist Program (theregister.com) 60
Liam Proven reports via The Register: Bad news for those who want to play with OpenVMS in non-production use. Older versions are disappearing, and the terms are getting much more restrictive. The corporation behind the continued development of OpenVMS, VMS Software, Inc. -- or VSI to its friends, if it has any left after this -- has announced the latest Updates to the Community Program. The news does not look good: you can't get the Alpha and Itanium versions any more, only a limited x86-64 edition.
OpenVMS is one of the granddaddies of big serious OSes. A direct descendant of the OSes that inspired DOS, CP/M, OS/2, and Windows, as well as the native OS of the hardware on which Unix first went 32-bit, VMS has been around for nearly half a century. For decades, its various owners have offered various flavors of "hobbyist program" under which you could get licenses to install and run it for free, as long as it wasn't in production use. Since Compaq acquired DEC, then HP acquired Compaq, its prospects looked checkered. HP officially killed it off in 2013, then in 2014 granted it a reprieve and sold it off instead. New owner VSI ported it to x86-64, releasing that new version 9.2 in 2022. Around this time last year, we covered VSI adding AMD support and opening a hobbyist program of its own. It seems from the latest announcement that it has been disappointed by the reception: "Despite our initial aspirations for robust community engagement, the reality has fallen short of our expectations. The level of participation in activities such as contributing open source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on forums has not matched the scale of the program. As a result, we find ourselves at a crossroads, compelled to reassess and recalibrate our approach."
Although HPE stopped offering hobbyist licenses for the original VAX versions of OpenVMS in 2020, VSI continued to maintain OpenVMS 8 (in other words, the Alpha and Itanium editions) while it worked on version 9 for x86-64. VSI even offered a Student Edition, which included a freeware Alpha emulator and a copy of OpenVMS 8.4 to run inside it. Those licenses run out in 2025, and they won't be renewed. If you have vintage DEC Alpha or HP Integrity boxes with Itanic chips, you won't be able to get a legal licensed copy of OpenVMS for them, or renew the license of any existing installations -- unless you pay, of course. There will still be a Community license edition, but from now on it's x86-64 only. Although OpenVMS 9 mainly targets hypervisors anyway, it does support bare-metal operations on a single model of HPE server, the ProLiant DL380 Gen10. If you have one of them to play with -- well, tough. Now Community users only get a VM image, supplied as a VMWare .vmdk file. It contains a ready-to-go "OpenVMS system disk with OpenVMS, compilers and development tools installed." Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually. The only alternative for those with older systems is to apply to be an OpenVMS Ambassador.
OpenVMS is one of the granddaddies of big serious OSes. A direct descendant of the OSes that inspired DOS, CP/M, OS/2, and Windows, as well as the native OS of the hardware on which Unix first went 32-bit, VMS has been around for nearly half a century. For decades, its various owners have offered various flavors of "hobbyist program" under which you could get licenses to install and run it for free, as long as it wasn't in production use. Since Compaq acquired DEC, then HP acquired Compaq, its prospects looked checkered. HP officially killed it off in 2013, then in 2014 granted it a reprieve and sold it off instead. New owner VSI ported it to x86-64, releasing that new version 9.2 in 2022. Around this time last year, we covered VSI adding AMD support and opening a hobbyist program of its own. It seems from the latest announcement that it has been disappointed by the reception: "Despite our initial aspirations for robust community engagement, the reality has fallen short of our expectations. The level of participation in activities such as contributing open source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on forums has not matched the scale of the program. As a result, we find ourselves at a crossroads, compelled to reassess and recalibrate our approach."
Although HPE stopped offering hobbyist licenses for the original VAX versions of OpenVMS in 2020, VSI continued to maintain OpenVMS 8 (in other words, the Alpha and Itanium editions) while it worked on version 9 for x86-64. VSI even offered a Student Edition, which included a freeware Alpha emulator and a copy of OpenVMS 8.4 to run inside it. Those licenses run out in 2025, and they won't be renewed. If you have vintage DEC Alpha or HP Integrity boxes with Itanic chips, you won't be able to get a legal licensed copy of OpenVMS for them, or renew the license of any existing installations -- unless you pay, of course. There will still be a Community license edition, but from now on it's x86-64 only. Although OpenVMS 9 mainly targets hypervisors anyway, it does support bare-metal operations on a single model of HPE server, the ProLiant DL380 Gen10. If you have one of them to play with -- well, tough. Now Community users only get a VM image, supplied as a VMWare .vmdk file. It contains a ready-to-go "OpenVMS system disk with OpenVMS, compilers and development tools installed." Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually. The only alternative for those with older systems is to apply to be an OpenVMS Ambassador.
Horrible License Terms (Score:3)
Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually.
Annual license that is a complete pain-in-the-A$$
In other words How To Make Something Seriously Restricted Without Actually Saying So
Re: (Score:2)
Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually.
Annual license that is a complete pain-in-the-A$$
In other words How To Make Something Seriously Restricted Without Actually Saying So
Yeah, it sounds like they're intentionally driving away anyone but paying customers at this point.
Re: (Score:1)
Of cognate interest, spotted in the wilds, some mad bastards - The VMS Liberation Front (VLF):
https://webscene.ir/distro/VLF/2012/10.October
Open not so open (Score:2)
They honestly wonder why they didn't get any community engagement? The way they license it I get the feeling they were hoping people would simply do VMS's documentation and QA work for them. I understand VMS is an extremely niche system now, with minimal interest at all, commercial or not. But honestly if they ever wanted any sort of community at all, it's going to have to be open source.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah its a model from the old shareware days of the 90s that never really got updated to modern expectations.
This is a shame really. Younger coders really have no perspective on what us old greybeards worked with back in the day, and just how different, and frankly interesting, the old mainframes where compared to the current world of clustered microcomputers running either windows or some variant of unix thats almost always either Linux or BSD.
VMS was a very un-unix OS, under the hood closer to windows tha
Re: (Score:2)
VMS was a very un-unix OS, under the hood closer to windows than windows to (*)nix
Windows is based on ideas from VMS. The lead designer of WIndows NT was Dave Cutler, who earlier had designed VMS.
VMS + 1 =
WNT
Re: Open not so open (Score:2)
Just a shame he didnt port over the reliability too.
Re: Open not so open (Score:2)
NT 3.51 was very reliable. Then in NT4 they merged the Kernel and GDI and the rest has been a shitfest ever since
Re: Open not so open (Score:3)
No it wasnt. I worked at a company that tried 3.5 out as an alternative to AIX around 94. If it didnt bluescreen after a week it would need rebooting anyway as memory leaks ground it to a halt. Until w2k all nt versions were garbage.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Open not so open (Score:2)
I had uptimes of months. 3.51 was a significant upgrade over 3.5.
Re: Open not so open (Score:2)
AIX had uptimes of years and would have been longer if not for updates. Months is not impressive for a corp that requires.5 9s uptime for its servers.
Re: (Score:2)
AIX had uptimes of years and would have been longer if not for updates. Months is not impressive for a corp that requires.5 9s uptime for its servers.
Uptimes of years means you're not getting timely security updates. Requiring 5 9s for individual servers is a sign of fragile infrastructure design by incompetents.
Re: Open not so open (Score:2)
Most *nix can be updated on the fly unlike the MS ToyOS without taking the entire machine down. Only major kernel update required a reboot. But thanks for proving you've never worked in a high end corporate enviroment and dont have a clue.
Re: (Score:2)
Most *nix can be updated on the fly unlike the MS ToyOS without taking the entire machine down. Only major kernel update required a reboot. But thanks for proving you've never worked in a high end corporate enviroment and dont have a clue.
Oh my sweet summer child, my first sysadmin job was in a SunOS4 shop, I've supported TME10 for IBM and been an admin at Cisco, and updates with major security ramifications have frequently involved updates to the kernel and/or libc and required a reboot. It is you, sir, who has no clue.
Re: (Score:2)
I ran Win2k for ten years. Utterly reliable, it would run for months.
Never found WinNT to be unreliable (Score:2)
Just a shame he didnt port over the reliability too.
I've found both WinNT and Linux to be extremely reliable. However I build my own dual booting PC from parts and I select quality well supported parts. Maybe a video driver is flaky, revert to previous and all is well.
The only time I ever had a flaky WinNT system was a school mandated Dell laptop. And the Linux experience on that machine was even worse.
Most problems with WinNT are neither its design nor its implementation, its crappy 3rd party drivers. Same with Linux. It'll be interesting to see how A
Re: (Score:2)
The real question is outside the academic world where it might be an instructive thing to look at in terms of design choices a long side minix, what use is VMS today?
I am not trolling at all its a serious question. The NT kernel was designed by people who came directly out the VMS world, like Dave Cutler. Even as a hobby thing I would something like ReactOS (an open re-implementation of NT) would be more interesting. At least the implementation language in use would date from this century and it would fea
Re: (Score:1)
As I recall, indexed files were simply binary files that contained a key-to-location-within-file table. I came to work on an image processing ground system in 1982. "Work orders" were used to identify intervals and scenes of data to process. A work order was stored in a file and as the order was processed, programs would update status and quality fields in the interval and scene records. In addition, a program had to be written to allow hand editing of the work orders. This always seemed to me to be ex
Re: (Score:2)
I think quite a lot of sytems had record oriented file systems, or indexed files, etc, and the Unix idea of all files being a stream of bytes was newish. But even in Unix you see relics of this, as in fwrite() having both parameters for size of item and number of items. Though Unix didn't have indexed files. VMS even had the line-oriented records, where each record was a textual line and if you read one record you get one line.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the lock manager! In the early 1990s, we built a two-VAX ground control system for an experimental radar instrument flown on the Space Shuttle and we used the distributed lock manager to initiate automatic fail-over to the redundant computer.
We ported a UNIX+C generic control center software system (from NASA) to VMS for this. (A project for the Italian Space Agency who specified VAX/VMS.) I had helped to write that UNIX software plus I had extensive VMS experience, so I was brought on as a subcontr
Re: (Score:2)
Most minicomputer operating systems at the time had structured files (e.g. Data General). I'm strongly inclined to believe no one has them today, because it was a dumb idea.
Re: (Score:2)
They borrowed ideas from VMS, but they didn't copy. A lot of what VMS did was tightly tied to the VAX architecture. So the paging system that seemed alright for the VMS and batch/timeshare uses was a bit iffy on a 386 for single user. The VAX was a BIG system at the time, bigger than systems Unix was on. So some of the VMS design didn't really apply to the target of NT which was a personal computer (PC) or workstation (Alpha).
Also rememer that DEC at the time were the young whippersnappers versus the st
Re: (Score:1)
The VAX was a BIG system at the time, bigger than systems Unix was on.
I guess it depends on the dates, but was that true? I was an undergraduate programmer working for a professor at the University of Maryland in 1980 or 1981 when the CS graduate student computer lab installed their first VAX. It ran UNIX, of course (BSD, I guess, though I don't think I was aware of the distinction at the time). The lab already had a raised floor and air conditioning as the existing PDP-11s were decidedly not physically small.
Yes, DEC became "old codgers" unfortunately. I would have liked
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, BSD was a port to the VAX. Earlier Unixes were PDP-11 initially, so that was the comparison. Early Unix didn't even have a modern paging system.
Re: (Score:2)
I cut my eyeteeth on OpenVMS/DSM in the VA. The VA medical center at which I worked had a cluster of 6 DEC Alphas that ran VistA on DSM, which lived on top of VMS.
In some ways it's still a little odd that nobody even does file versioning the way VMS did it. There were a couple of times that being able to reach back to FILE.TXT;2 after I'd screwed up FILE.TXT;3 was a lifesaver.
But, after a while InterSystems bought up all of the other popular(?) commercial implementations of Mumps, and now we're on top of
Re: (Score:1)
In some ways it's still a little odd that nobody even does file versioning the way VMS did it.
At least one person still does! When I moved from VMS to UNIX 35 years ago, I wrote a shell script to create versioned backups of a file. I wrote another script to invoke my editor after creating a new backup version of the file to be edited, so FILE.TXT.001, FILE.TX.002, ... It has saved my life too on occasion. (My 35-year-old editor is MicroEMACS programmed to work like keypad EDT.)
No big deal (Score:2)
The open source license generator is around.
Re: (Score:2)
Sucks to have to resort to crime to use software designed for hardware I own.
Too bad (Score:2)
It's a shame that so few people have done any work on a command-line system, and even fewer with a good one, like VMS. Unix and the various *ixs are torturous by comparison - like "chmod" VS "set protection", for a good example. The editors, too, are far better. EDT crushes VI or Emacs.
Re: (Score:2)
I always thought it was weird how EDT records every single keystroke. I don't think they understood what we really meant by having an "autosave" feature.
Re: (Score:3)
You know you can save and edit the keystroke file and use it to create macros, right?
Re: (Score:1)
You don't think DEC engineers understood "autosave"? Probably not, because it wasn't needed -- Vaxes never crashed! I even remember a system operator removing the disk pack I was editing a file on in order to move a large set of files to another computer. I left the EDT editor up. She brought the disk pack back a couple of hours later and EDT resumed where I left off.
This was in the early 1980s. Keep in mind the state of UNIX. In the late 1980s, prior to his Tcl/Tk efforts, John Osterhout researched l
Re: (Score:2)
That, too. The entire time we ran a variety of VAX systems heavily, I think we had maybe 2 outright crashes on maybe 20 system (in use by hundreds of people) in 25-30 years.
Re: (Score:2)
by comparison - like "chmod" VS "set protection"
This highlights the only thing I hated about VMS when I was exiled there for a few years :) Way too much typing and IIRC no tab completion. Also most command like arguments were like using only the long format of GNU Utilities, no short 1 letter arguments.
Outside of that it was a very interesting environment and I liked using it.
Re: (Score:2)
No tab completion, but, not one actually typed out "set protection" - all you needed was enough letters to have it be unambiguous, so "set prot" was good enough. "Directory" = "dir", etc.
It's always funny to watch a Unix person trying to log off, more-or-less they will never figure it out unless you just tell them how.
I also note - I was once a VMS sysadmin for several of the *many* clusters we used to have. I still use VMS very frequently as it is the bas
Re: (Score:1)
With some work, not much typing actually! :) I had some experience with UNIX when I graduated from college and went to work on VMS in real life. As AC notes, you could define aliases for commands and I did so for ls, rm, etc., etc. I wrote a DCL script for cd that would convert the command, "cd subdir" to VMS's "SET DEFAULT [.subdir]". Also, as AC notes, you could define logical names which function much like environment variables. I added a "d" argument to "cd" to indicate a logical name, so "cd somew
Dry your eyes (Score:2)
Dry your eyes. Windows NT, which is the technology running all the current versions of Windows, is the next-generation, 64-bit VAX/VMS and was heavily influenced, if not created by the same creators of VAX/VMS.
Re: Dry your eyes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, fork(2) still doesn't run on Windows (and neither does it run on OpenVMS or the other DEC-inspired systems like DOS, CP/M and OS/2). What a shame.
Re: Dry your eyes (Score:2)
Apparently fork() does exist inside the NT kernel but for [reasons] has never been exposed in win32.
Re: Dry your eyes (Score:2)
Macs case insensitive filesystem ... until you use wildcards in the terminal. Then it's very much case sensitive. It's a bit of a dogs dinner IMO.
Re: (Score:2)
Its Like Windows had a different API (Score:2)
As a software developer, I have huge problems getting things to work on Windows.
That's odd. Have you tried using the native tools and native APIs?
Seriously, I've done numerous cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux projects. Don't fight the platform, any of them. Separate platform specific from general code, the later can often be shared portable C/C++ code. Use the respective native APIs for the platform specific stuff, ideally this is just UI code. Or if your app is simple enough use a cross platform framework for the UI code.
Modern C++ helps too. For example C++ threading compiles t
Re: (Score:2)
Dry your eyes. Windows NT, which is the technology running all the current versions of Windows, is the next-generation, 64-bit VAX/VMS and was heavily influenced, if not created by the same creators of VAX/VMS.
Indeed, and nobody will ever need more than 64 bits!
Re: (Score:2)
Someone (Not me, no time) needs to write a DCL shell for Windows. DCL was a great scripting language. There was once a commercial shell available (maybe for DOS?) but I've never used it.
Re: (Score:2)
From the wikipedia page on DCL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
DCL is available for other operating systems as well, including
VCL and VX/DCL for Unix,
VCL for MS-DOS, OS/2 and Windows,
PC-DCL[4] and Open DCL for Windows/Linux
and Accelr8 DCL Lite for Windows.[5]
DCL is the basis of the XLNT language, implemented on Windows by an interpreter-IDE-WSH engine combination with CGI capabilities distrib
Y2K called (Score:2)
The last VMS systems I used were phased out 1999 because of Y2K, as making the software run on them Y2K-proof wasn't worth the effort.
While I feel for the conservators of computer museums, I don't see why anyone would still want to port anything on there. I'll have to say "let it rest".
Re: (Score:1)
Any Y2K problem on VMS would have been in the applications software, not the operating system. VMS represented time with a 64-bit, 100-nanosecond count since an epoch in 1858. So it's not subject to the 2038 problem either. But, yes, updating the applications software may not have been worth the effort and I can understand a company switching to another OS and/or vendor.
And it all started with RSX (Score:1)
Ah the classic (Score:1)
And the scam of education that is pay a lot of money, do a lot of work, get barely any credit for it.
Re: (Score:2)
What is VMS really used for in modern times? (Score:2)
I always found VMS "interesting" in the early days, I still don't grok it well. But, in a modern context, where does VMS really have a role? I have heard that there are a few big companies who run VMS, perhaps from older implementation and business needs, are the ones ultimately footing the financing for OpenVMS. Porting it to the x86_64 architecture must have been a feat, but to what end?
The last time I saw VMS being used in a business context was in 1988 at a major insurance carrier. Other than that
Re: (Score:2)
VMS has a versioning filesystems, which is a useful thing to have. It's also pretty secure (once you disable scripts in mail subject headers).
I'd contend it has a role in server systems, but really it's a struggle to think where else it would fit.
Where VMS still has a value... (Score:2)
For the most part there's still a few places I would like to see exported from VMS, rather than trying to run VMS on X64...
The first is networked and clustered filesystems - VMS had this down cold. Easy to configure and manage (at least at the user level) and very transparent. Files could be on any node of a cluster. Which brings me to the second:
Distributed Lock Management. I have no idea why this isn't a thing now. We have parts of it, and even SMB has some locking, but it's not the same as being abl
Re: (Score:2)
I've always wondered by Linux or BSD didn't move in some of these directions; especially with the clustering capabilities that VMS has. Even MacOS gave up on it. Over my career, I've been in situations where I could have used this. We have the cloud now, but there are still use cases for robust clustering -- that is, clustering that doesn't require black magic to work :) LOL
I see that OpenVMS is making some effort to "modernize" its OS, bringing in ports of open source, visual studio, etc. I always wo