7 ms·

OpenVMS 9.2 for x86: Auto boot, licenses, PAKs, networking and SSH

134 points by zdw 4y ago

justinclift 4y ago
Interesting. Looking through the release notes and roadmap, it seems to not yet support AMD processors nor have native C (family) compilers yet. Those are on the roadmap for the 9.2-1 release though, which looks to be for "some time" in the next few months. Will have to wait until then to look at it, as we don't have Intel processors running anywhere any more.
- eschaton 4y ago
  It does have native compilers to download and install, the release notes are out of date.
  - jabl 4y ago
    This presentation from a few years ago says their x86 porting approach is based on utilizing LLVM (and clang for C++) rather than writing an x86 backend for their existing compiler. Has this been done by now, and is it the way it was eventually done? https://vmssoftware.com/docs/2021-04-27-x86-Compiler-Update.pdf https://vmssoftware.com/docs/2021-04-27-x86-Compiler-Update....
    - ch_123 4y ago
      Yes, the native compilers are now LLVM based. Reading between the lines, it seems like this migration was one of the reasons this release has been delayed by a few years.
- mrlonglong 4y ago
  AMD is supported. It runs quite nicely on my threadripper on VirtualBox under Linux. Good times are here again.
unixhero 4y ago
It omits the obvious. How can one download this and try at home?
- jore 4y ago
  maybe part 1 of it will help [1] https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_9.2_for_x86_Getting_Started.html https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_9.2_for_x86_Getting_Starte...
- eschaton 4y ago
  Register for a hobbyist license for Alpha and Itanium, and you’ll also get an x86-64 hobbyist license. You can then download it all via the support portal at sp.vmssoftware.com and set up a VM to boot the installation ISO.
  - unixhero 4y ago
    Thank you! Maybe it will be a good enough argument that I own a machine capable of running the alpha build of OpenVMS. Wonder why they are keeping such tabs on the users of their newfangled x86 build.
  - octotoad 4y ago
    I "registered" for an Alpha license last week (I own several systems), but all I got was an email with credentials to access VSI's SFTP server, using a shared 'ACOMMUNITY' username. I cannot access the portal with the email address I used for this, and attempting a 'Forgot password' just returns "Error 404: Email not found.". You can see 'ICOMMUNITY' and 'XCOMMUNITY' directories in the server, but I'm not able to access them. Has anyone that has requested a license (Alpha/Itanium) in the last few weeks actually been able to log in to the portal?
freedomben 4y ago
If like me, you didn't realize VMS was still being developed and had changed its name to OpenVMS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
- ithkuil 4y ago
  DEC renamed VMS to OpenVMS in 1992 ...
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Hey hey. What's 30 years between friends?
    - vaxman 4y ago
      ROFL
    - unixhero 4y ago
      Yeah let's not bicker and argue about who killed who here :)
      - ithkuil 4y ago
        indeed, let's bicker about who killed whom instead!
        unixhero 4y ago
        Thank you, I stand corrected.
justin66 4y ago
Clearly it's available to some people, but their website shows the hobbyist license for x86 as merely "planned," not "available." https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/ https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  Doesn't sound very "open"
  - skissane 4y ago
    “Open” in the 80s and early 90s sense of “open systems”, i.e. it implements open standards such as POSIX. Back then, it was common for vendors to incorporate “Open” in their product name when they added POSIX support. As well as OpenVMS, other examples included ICL’s OpenVME, IBM’s MVS OpenEdition (now known as z/OS Unix Systems Services) and z/VM OpenExtensions (originally also named OpenEdition), and Softway’s OpenNT (an add-on which improved the POSIX subsystem of Windows NT, predecessor to Microsoft’s SFU/SUA). Another less obvious example was Siemens BS2000/OSD - the “O” in OSD stands for “Open” Other products were labelled “Open”, not due to POSIX, but rather because they implemented the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol suite. Or Apple’s OpenDoc, which was intended as a cross-platform open standard alternative to Microsoft’s Windows-only OLE (and indeed was adopted as an open standard by OMG, albeit it didn’t last long) Remember the term “open source” wasn’t even invented until 1998, so criticising something which was first named OpenX pre-1998 (as OpenVMS was) for not being open source is rather anachronistic
    - krylon 4y ago
      I still find BS2000 to be the coolest name of any OS out there. Siemens being a German company, and the system going back to the 1970s, I'm almost certain it stood for "Betriebssystem 2000" originally (Betriebssystem being German for operating system), which is so quaint. And of course, in English speaking countries the acronym BS has another meaning that makes it even more delicious. ;-)
anilakar 4y ago
I love the time zone choices during installation: - GMT - GMT-0 - GMT for a second time - GMT0 - GMTPLUS0 - GREENWICH - UCT - UNIVERSAL - UTC - ZULU and "FACTORY" that likely is either UTC or a semi-random US timezone. Overall this thing has a strong enterprise smell from the eighties and nineties, and not in a good sense. Edit: on another glance, it's funny how much the linked article, online documentation and UI put emphasis on license management. We're here to make money, son!
- icedchai 4y ago
  VMS goes back to the 70's, now across 4 architectures: VAX, Alpha, Itanium, and now x86. I'm sure it has accumulated a ton of cruft for backwards compatibility. I worked at a VMS shop for a bit during college and shortly thereafter! It's fun to play around with, but nothing I'd want to deal with full time.
- bbatha 4y ago
  My favorite VMSism is that rough equivalent of root privileges is called "executive" privilege like some C suite is going to swoop in a sudo for you.
colinb 4y ago
Story time. My first job out of college, working on the port of VMS from VAX to Alpha AXP. This was before it was renamed OpenVMS (Posix team in Italy!) and when Alpha was still a codename (possible alternates for final choice of product name included VAX-2000, and MondoVAX (still my favourite)). I was assigned to port the Bad Block Detector (BADBLK? I don't remember exactly) to the 64 bit architecture. The 'port' turned out to be change the build files to use the correct compiler and flags. I don't remember if the tool was written in PL/1, Bliss or VAX assembler, but we had compilers (yes, even for VAX 32 bit assembler) for all of them. The interesting part was the testing. A Bad Block Detector is a piece of software that watches for disk blocks going bad, and remaps them to spare capacity (your spinning rust disk is lying about its size - don't know if this is true for SSDs). It might even try to copy data from the failing blocks to the remapped space if there's time. More modern h/w does this in the firmware on the drive. It's transparent to the OS. Testing this behaviour is... challenging. Recipe: Test the Bad Block Detector Serves: millions Time: A couple of hour elapsed Ingredients: - a VAXstation - i.e. a biggish desktop machine that can run Alpha emulation well enough for our purposes. All of its disks are connected on a SCSI bus. - a 3.5inch floppy drive with a SCSI connection (yes, you read that right) - a box of 3.5 inch disks - a paperclip Method: Boot emulated environment. Set cross compiled Bad Block Detector running. It watches for 'interesting' disk related events. Insert floppy disk. Note the Bad Block Detector does nothing (because disk has no bad blocks.) Take paperclip in right hand. Take fresh disk in left hand. With pinky finger, push back the sliding cover that protects the delicate rusty surface. Using paperclip, gouge a few hundred kilobytes of damage into rusty surface. Replace good disk with scratched disk. Watch console for proof that Bad Block Detector woke up, spotted the badness, and remapped its little heart out. Serve to delighted and amazed customers. Loose billions of dollars, arrange purchase by Compaq, rinse, repeat.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  In a not very big town in Northern Europe, I cycled past Digital Equipment offices on my way to school. They had such a huge work force all over the world, and sunk into the ocean almost without a trace.
  - 4y ago
fredsmith219 4y ago
I worked on an openvms system rubbing a lab at a hospital in 2019. Damn that thing was rickety. DCL saved my bacon for a while, since their COBOL compiler was broken. I did miss command-line history. I was watching this project like a hawk, hoping that I could set up a VM for testing. I'm glad that they finally released something but I their number of users has to be in the hundreds at most.
- ch_123 4y ago
  According to a post on the VSI forum from one of their staff, there are about 1,300 people registered fro the hobbyist license. There are dozens of us... dozens!
jcpham2 4y ago
14 years of my life spent supporting debt collection attorneys and their OpenVMS based debt collection software… never again. Great article on supporting and troubleshooting and the setup of OpenVMS
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  Seems to me that the more soul-destroying part of that is the 'debt collection' and not 'OpenVMS'.
  - jcpham2 4y ago
    mmmm-hmmm
rwmj 4y ago
Is there any value to keeping it non-free? Do they still sell it to commercial customers?
- praptak 4y ago
  It's probably the other way around. Keeping it non-free requires doing nothing, so it is the default. OTOH, freeing such a code base is costly, especially if multiple licenses cover different parts of the code or if the code contains references to stuff that you don't want to go public.
- vaxman 4y ago
  Will be sold until the end of time, though swapping the hardware out from under the software is a no-brainer. I wonder what this puppy looks like running on a couple 7,529 pin 120 core Intel Xeons —going to need a bigger monitor to run SHOW PROCESS on!
  - mrlonglong 4y ago
    Hobbyist licence is limited to 6 cores BUT it will see them all just fine. I assigned 16GB of ECC RAM and 8 cores. Fun times watching it fly.
- electroly 4y ago
  VMS Software's intention in porting VMS to x86 was certainly to capture commercial sales. It was an expensive undertaking; there would be no other reason to spend the money besides expecting to recoup it in sales. The whole company's existence is because of the existing commercial customer base. They acquired the rights to VMS from HPE with the expectation that they'd make money with it. They have a press release talking about all the support contracts they inherited from HPE. The real question is: what do they get out of offering a hobbyist license? I honestly don't think they get anything and it's just a nice gesture of goodwill. Nobody is going to pick up the hobbyist VMS license and then decide to adopt VMS at work. I bet it doesn't lead to a single extra commercial sale. It's nice that they're offering it despite that.
  - 4y ago
anthk 4y ago
OpenVMS would get far more attention if it was free as in freedom. They could always get money from enterprise support. On CDE, well, any other WM would suffice.
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  What about FreeVMS? https://github.com/rroart/freevms https://github.com/rroart/freevms
  - NikkiA 4y ago
    I've been watching freevms since about 2002, and in 20 years it's still not as usable as linux was when I started using it - in late 1992.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
I loved VMS on my VAX days, is this suitable for server deployement instead of Linux? [Edit] Sorry was fooled by "Open"
ch_123 4y ago
FYI: CDE is broken for a number of people, there's a thread about it on VSI's community forums.
mkovach 4y ago
The gold old days. My first real corporate gig was programming (Fortran, DCL, and odd bits of Ada) AND operations on various VMS clusters. Fun times. I have occasionally created a Hobbyist cluster and played around with it just long enough to remember when went towards UNIX. I have been at several gigs where somebody has said, "Oh yea, that connects to a VMS system for x,y,z," and I know enough to sound competent. Still kind fun to find it out in the wild from time-to-time. But I'll have to give this a look see, there is still some fascinate technology at work there.
dboreham 4y ago
Whoever owns VMS now: please bring back VAX (not x86, subject of this article) hobby license paks. Some of us want to keep our hardware running with the clock set to the correct date.
- xvilka 4y ago
  Also would be nice to run it on SIMH[1]. [1] https://github.com/open-simh/simh/ https://github.com/open-simh/simh/
  - JPLeRouzic 4y ago
    genuine question: Is Vax simulation broken on SIMH? https://github.com/open-simh/simh/tree/master/VAX https://github.com/open-simh/simh/tree/master/VAX
    - rnd0 4y ago
      What makes you ask? If you're encountering problems maybe file an issue?
- octotoad 4y ago
  IIRC VSI never got the VAX stuff in the deal with HP. I don't think HP will ever bother to bring back the hobbyist program just for VAX, unfortunately. There are easy ways around this lack of official licenses. Ways that I can't/won't go in to here.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Obviously a 1990s signature scheme can likely be brute forced today or has some known vulnerability. I remember back in the day discovering that the license key scheme for Sun's NFS for DOS had the property that re-ordering bytes from one valid key created a second also valid key.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    If you google for "VMS Liberation Front" you'll find your answer.
_fat_santa 4y ago
This world of Unix operating systems was way before my time (I got started with Linux in 2008). One dumb question I have is why does something like this exist in 2022? We have tons of other Linux distro's that can run any number of workloads, is it just a matter of you have all your legacy stuff on OpenVMS and it would be easier to stay on it? Or does OpenVMS provide some feature that you just can't get in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc.
- omnibrain 4y ago
  First: It's not a Unix system. It's a whole different tradition. For practical reasons it got "invaded" by the unix userland, though. But you already answered it yourself. Legacy stuff. And because it is NOT a unix system porting the legacy stuff running on it would be even more difficult.
- jonstewart 4y ago
  The agronomy research company I worked for in college had a small IT department of three programmers/DBAs. They ran Oracle on a big Alpha with some older vaxen serving in auxiliary roles. They had bunches of programs written in VAXBASIC over a couple decades that ran the company, managing the hundreds of thousands of seed strains they were testing. I’m sure they’ve transitioned in the two decades since, but back then there wasn’t any off the shelf software for their purposes and it would have been an enormous time sink to port over all those old programs. DEC’s role in the tech industry was enormous and platform transitions can’t happen overnight. OpenVMS provided DEC customers with a lifeline. (Also, VMS != Unix) Today’s tax day in the US and my bet is that some 50 year old COBOL program running on an IBM zServer is computing over your data.
- rahen 4y ago
  One one hand, this is mostly for legacy purpose, like OS 2200 for the current Dorados (Univac 1100), Z/OS for the IBM 360/390/Z line, or GECOS on some Bull/GE hardware, all originating from the early 60s and still alive nowadays. Heck, you can even still find TOPS-20 running on some network gear. On the other hand, VAX is pretty much dead by now and I don't think VMS really was a thing on x86.
lizknope 4y ago
I had only used my Atari 800, Apple II,DOS PCs and Macs in the 1980's. In 1991 I went to a new high school and we had a VAX running VMS. I was amazed that hundreds of users could be logged into the same machine all doing their own thing. A buggy program could crash with no threat to any other program you ran or any other user running their programs. Sending email and phone / chat messages was really cool. Then I found the Unix SunOS and AIX systems and liked them far more. I learned that multi user systems went back decades but at the time I didn't really know and felt like something very powerful was lost going to these small personal computers with so many memory and operating system limitations. Of course learning about the vast price differences quickly made me realize why.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Ok my story. I touched real a VAX/VMS system exactly once. Was working as a sysad at an aerospace concern in the mid 90s. There was an old curmudgeon scientist named Norm with a comb-over who so-far refused give up his VAX—much to the chagrin of the IT dept. :-D He finally did, but not yet on this day. I came in to his office one summer, probably to help with a Mac or PC, and was intrigued by the unique machine. He let me poke at it and look around. Not sure what I expected... some kind of mainframe kind of thing? To my surprise was a graphics terminal with the X Window system running along with the CDE desktop. Believe the main box was in a lab somewhere else. Kinda blew my mind because I had recently tried CDE out on a cheap Lintel PC I had in my office. Slackware? Maybe had seen it on a Sun as well. (Was a great place to work and learn, the "UN of computers" I called it.) So it was familiar in that sense. Started up a character terminal and poked around. Had the crazy prompt [SYS$FOO...Bar] or something and verbose uppercase commands. Had versions numbers in the filenames after semi-colons. I think there was very good help system as well. In total, a fascinating combination of archaic sophistication. Unfortunately, a lot of great ideas from the old days were lost in the drive to standardization. I think I preferred VMS' named volume approach also taken on Amiga, Netware, and limited in DOS/NT. (Been on Unixen for decades now, so don't hate the single root, but find it less obvious where I am.) On the other hand, later I read ESR's take of VMS and it wasn't all that positive: https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#vms https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#vm...

134 points by zdw 4y ago

Interesting. Looking through the release notes and roadmap, it seems to not yet support AMD processors nor have native C (family) compilers yet. Those are on the roadmap for the 9.2-1 release though, which looks to be for "some time" in the next few months. Will have to wait until then to look at it, as we don't have Intel processors running anywhere any more.

eschaton 4y ago
It does have native compilers to download and install, the release notes are out of date.
- jabl 4y ago
  This presentation from a few years ago says their x86 porting approach is based on utilizing LLVM (and clang for C++) rather than writing an x86 backend for their existing compiler. Has this been done by now, and is it the way it was eventually done? https://vmssoftware.com/docs/2021-04-27-x86-Compiler-Update.pdf https://vmssoftware.com/docs/2021-04-27-x86-Compiler-Update....
  - ch_123 4y ago
    Yes, the native compilers are now LLVM based. Reading between the lines, it seems like this migration was one of the reasons this release has been delayed by a few years.
mrlonglong 4y ago
AMD is supported. It runs quite nicely on my threadripper on VirtualBox under Linux. Good times are here again.

unixhero 4y ago

It omits the obvious. How can one download this and try at home?

jore 4y ago
maybe part 1 of it will help [1] https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_9.2_for_x86_Getting_Started.html https://raymii.org/s/blog/OpenVMS_9.2_for_x86_Getting_Starte...
eschaton 4y ago
Register for a hobbyist license for Alpha and Itanium, and you’ll also get an x86-64 hobbyist license. You can then download it all via the support portal at sp.vmssoftware.com and set up a VM to boot the installation ISO.
- unixhero 4y ago
  Thank you! Maybe it will be a good enough argument that I own a machine capable of running the alpha build of OpenVMS. Wonder why they are keeping such tabs on the users of their newfangled x86 build.
- octotoad 4y ago
  I "registered" for an Alpha license last week (I own several systems), but all I got was an email with credentials to access VSI's SFTP server, using a shared 'ACOMMUNITY' username. I cannot access the portal with the email address I used for this, and attempting a 'Forgot password' just returns "Error 404: Email not found.". You can see 'ICOMMUNITY' and 'XCOMMUNITY' directories in the server, but I'm not able to access them. Has anyone that has requested a license (Alpha/Itanium) in the last few weeks actually been able to log in to the portal?

freedomben 4y ago

If like me, you didn't realize VMS was still being developed and had changed its name to OpenVMS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS

ithkuil 4y ago
DEC renamed VMS to OpenVMS in 1992 ...
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Hey hey. What's 30 years between friends?
  - vaxman 4y ago
    ROFL
  - unixhero 4y ago
    Yeah let's not bicker and argue about who killed who here :)
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      indeed, let's bicker about who killed whom instead!
      - unixhero 4y ago
        Thank you, I stand corrected.

justin66 4y ago

Clearly it's available to some people, but their website shows the hobbyist license for x86 as merely "planned," not "available." https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/ https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/

RobotToaster 4y ago
Doesn't sound very "open"
- skissane 4y ago
  “Open” in the 80s and early 90s sense of “open systems”, i.e. it implements open standards such as POSIX. Back then, it was common for vendors to incorporate “Open” in their product name when they added POSIX support. As well as OpenVMS, other examples included ICL’s OpenVME, IBM’s MVS OpenEdition (now known as z/OS Unix Systems Services) and z/VM OpenExtensions (originally also named OpenEdition), and Softway’s OpenNT (an add-on which improved the POSIX subsystem of Windows NT, predecessor to Microsoft’s SFU/SUA). Another less obvious example was Siemens BS2000/OSD - the “O” in OSD stands for “Open” Other products were labelled “Open”, not due to POSIX, but rather because they implemented the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol suite. Or Apple’s OpenDoc, which was intended as a cross-platform open standard alternative to Microsoft’s Windows-only OLE (and indeed was adopted as an open standard by OMG, albeit it didn’t last long) Remember the term “open source” wasn’t even invented until 1998, so criticising something which was first named OpenX pre-1998 (as OpenVMS was) for not being open source is rather anachronistic
  - krylon 4y ago
    I still find BS2000 to be the coolest name of any OS out there. Siemens being a German company, and the system going back to the 1970s, I'm almost certain it stood for "Betriebssystem 2000" originally (Betriebssystem being German for operating system), which is so quaint. And of course, in English speaking countries the acronym BS has another meaning that makes it even more delicious. ;-)

anilakar 4y ago

I love the time zone choices during installation: - GMT - GMT-0 - GMT for a second time - GMT0 - GMTPLUS0 - GREENWICH - UCT - UNIVERSAL - UTC - ZULU and "FACTORY" that likely is either UTC or a semi-random US timezone. Overall this thing has a strong enterprise smell from the eighties and nineties, and not in a good sense. Edit: on another glance, it's funny how much the linked article, online documentation and UI put emphasis on license management. We're here to make money, son!

icedchai 4y ago
VMS goes back to the 70's, now across 4 architectures: VAX, Alpha, Itanium, and now x86. I'm sure it has accumulated a ton of cruft for backwards compatibility. I worked at a VMS shop for a bit during college and shortly thereafter! It's fun to play around with, but nothing I'd want to deal with full time.
bbatha 4y ago
My favorite VMSism is that rough equivalent of root privileges is called "executive" privilege like some C suite is going to swoop in a sudo for you.

colinb 4y ago

Story time. My first job out of college, working on the port of VMS from VAX to Alpha AXP. This was before it was renamed OpenVMS (Posix team in Italy!) and when Alpha was still a codename (possible alternates for final choice of product name included VAX-2000, and MondoVAX (still my favourite)). I was assigned to port the Bad Block Detector (BADBLK? I don't remember exactly) to the 64 bit architecture. The 'port' turned out to be change the build files to use the correct compiler and flags. I don't remember if the tool was written in PL/1, Bliss or VAX assembler, but we had compilers (yes, even for VAX 32 bit assembler) for all of them. The interesting part was the testing. A Bad Block Detector is a piece of software that watches for disk blocks going bad, and remaps them to spare capacity (your spinning rust disk is lying about its size - don't know if this is true for SSDs). It might even try to copy data from the failing blocks to the remapped space if there's time. More modern h/w does this in the firmware on the drive. It's transparent to the OS. Testing this behaviour is... challenging. Recipe: Test the Bad Block Detector Serves: millions Time: A couple of hour elapsed Ingredients: - a VAXstation - i.e. a biggish desktop machine that can run Alpha emulation well enough for our purposes. All of its disks are connected on a SCSI bus. - a 3.5inch floppy drive with a SCSI connection (yes, you read that right) - a box of 3.5 inch disks - a paperclip Method: Boot emulated environment. Set cross compiled Bad Block Detector running. It watches for 'interesting' disk related events. Insert floppy disk. Note the Bad Block Detector does nothing (because disk has no bad blocks.) Take paperclip in right hand. Take fresh disk in left hand. With pinky finger, push back the sliding cover that protects the delicate rusty surface. Using paperclip, gouge a few hundred kilobytes of damage into rusty surface. Replace good disk with scratched disk. Watch console for proof that Bad Block Detector woke up, spotted the badness, and remapped its little heart out. Serve to delighted and amazed customers. Loose billions of dollars, arrange purchase by Compaq, rinse, repeat.

actionfromafar 4y ago
In a not very big town in Northern Europe, I cycled past Digital Equipment offices on my way to school. They had such a huge work force all over the world, and sunk into the ocean almost without a trace.
- 4y ago

fredsmith219 4y ago

I worked on an openvms system rubbing a lab at a hospital in 2019. Damn that thing was rickety. DCL saved my bacon for a while, since their COBOL compiler was broken. I did miss command-line history. I was watching this project like a hawk, hoping that I could set up a VM for testing. I'm glad that they finally released something but I their number of users has to be in the hundreds at most.

ch_123 4y ago
According to a post on the VSI forum from one of their staff, there are about 1,300 people registered fro the hobbyist license. There are dozens of us... dozens!

jcpham2 4y ago

14 years of my life spent supporting debt collection attorneys and their OpenVMS based debt collection software… never again. Great article on supporting and troubleshooting and the setup of OpenVMS

bigbillheck 4y ago
Seems to me that the more soul-destroying part of that is the 'debt collection' and not 'OpenVMS'.
- jcpham2 4y ago
  mmmm-hmmm

rwmj 4y ago

Is there any value to keeping it non-free? Do they still sell it to commercial customers?

praptak 4y ago
It's probably the other way around. Keeping it non-free requires doing nothing, so it is the default. OTOH, freeing such a code base is costly, especially if multiple licenses cover different parts of the code or if the code contains references to stuff that you don't want to go public.
vaxman 4y ago
Will be sold until the end of time, though swapping the hardware out from under the software is a no-brainer. I wonder what this puppy looks like running on a couple 7,529 pin 120 core Intel Xeons —going to need a bigger monitor to run SHOW PROCESS on!
- mrlonglong 4y ago
  Hobbyist licence is limited to 6 cores BUT it will see them all just fine. I assigned 16GB of ECC RAM and 8 cores. Fun times watching it fly.
electroly 4y ago
VMS Software's intention in porting VMS to x86 was certainly to capture commercial sales. It was an expensive undertaking; there would be no other reason to spend the money besides expecting to recoup it in sales. The whole company's existence is because of the existing commercial customer base. They acquired the rights to VMS from HPE with the expectation that they'd make money with it. They have a press release talking about all the support contracts they inherited from HPE. The real question is: what do they get out of offering a hobbyist license? I honestly don't think they get anything and it's just a nice gesture of goodwill. Nobody is going to pick up the hobbyist VMS license and then decide to adopt VMS at work. I bet it doesn't lead to a single extra commercial sale. It's nice that they're offering it despite that.
- 4y ago

anthk 4y ago

OpenVMS would get far more attention if it was free as in freedom. They could always get money from enterprise support. On CDE, well, any other WM would suffice.

JPLeRouzic 4y ago
What about FreeVMS? https://github.com/rroart/freevms https://github.com/rroart/freevms
- NikkiA 4y ago
  I've been watching freevms since about 2002, and in 20 years it's still not as usable as linux was when I started using it - in late 1992.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

I loved VMS on my VAX days, is this suitable for server deployement instead of Linux? [Edit] Sorry was fooled by "Open"

ch_123 4y ago

FYI: CDE is broken for a number of people, there's a thread about it on VSI's community forums.

mkovach 4y ago

The gold old days. My first real corporate gig was programming (Fortran, DCL, and odd bits of Ada) AND operations on various VMS clusters. Fun times. I have occasionally created a Hobbyist cluster and played around with it just long enough to remember when went towards UNIX. I have been at several gigs where somebody has said, "Oh yea, that connects to a VMS system for x,y,z," and I know enough to sound competent. Still kind fun to find it out in the wild from time-to-time. But I'll have to give this a look see, there is still some fascinate technology at work there.

dboreham 4y ago

Whoever owns VMS now: please bring back VAX (not x86, subject of this article) hobby license paks. Some of us want to keep our hardware running with the clock set to the correct date.

xvilka 4y ago
Also would be nice to run it on SIMH[1]. [1] https://github.com/open-simh/simh/ https://github.com/open-simh/simh/
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  genuine question: Is Vax simulation broken on SIMH? https://github.com/open-simh/simh/tree/master/VAX https://github.com/open-simh/simh/tree/master/VAX
  - rnd0 4y ago
    What makes you ask? If you're encountering problems maybe file an issue?
octotoad 4y ago
IIRC VSI never got the VAX stuff in the deal with HP. I don't think HP will ever bother to bring back the hobbyist program just for VAX, unfortunately. There are easy ways around this lack of official licenses. Ways that I can't/won't go in to here.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Obviously a 1990s signature scheme can likely be brute forced today or has some known vulnerability. I remember back in the day discovering that the license key scheme for Sun's NFS for DOS had the property that re-ordering bytes from one valid key created a second also valid key.
- icedchai 4y ago
  If you google for "VMS Liberation Front" you'll find your answer.

_fat_santa 4y ago

This world of Unix operating systems was way before my time (I got started with Linux in 2008). One dumb question I have is why does something like this exist in 2022? We have tons of other Linux distro's that can run any number of workloads, is it just a matter of you have all your legacy stuff on OpenVMS and it would be easier to stay on it? Or does OpenVMS provide some feature that you just can't get in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc.

omnibrain 4y ago
First: It's not a Unix system. It's a whole different tradition. For practical reasons it got "invaded" by the unix userland, though. But you already answered it yourself. Legacy stuff. And because it is NOT a unix system porting the legacy stuff running on it would be even more difficult.
jonstewart 4y ago
The agronomy research company I worked for in college had a small IT department of three programmers/DBAs. They ran Oracle on a big Alpha with some older vaxen serving in auxiliary roles. They had bunches of programs written in VAXBASIC over a couple decades that ran the company, managing the hundreds of thousands of seed strains they were testing. I’m sure they’ve transitioned in the two decades since, but back then there wasn’t any off the shelf software for their purposes and it would have been an enormous time sink to port over all those old programs. DEC’s role in the tech industry was enormous and platform transitions can’t happen overnight. OpenVMS provided DEC customers with a lifeline. (Also, VMS != Unix) Today’s tax day in the US and my bet is that some 50 year old COBOL program running on an IBM zServer is computing over your data.
rahen 4y ago
One one hand, this is mostly for legacy purpose, like OS 2200 for the current Dorados (Univac 1100), Z/OS for the IBM 360/390/Z line, or GECOS on some Bull/GE hardware, all originating from the early 60s and still alive nowadays. Heck, you can even still find TOPS-20 running on some network gear. On the other hand, VAX is pretty much dead by now and I don't think VMS really was a thing on x86.

lizknope 4y ago

I had only used my Atari 800, Apple II,DOS PCs and Macs in the 1980's. In 1991 I went to a new high school and we had a VAX running VMS. I was amazed that hundreds of users could be logged into the same machine all doing their own thing. A buggy program could crash with no threat to any other program you ran or any other user running their programs. Sending email and phone / chat messages was really cool. Then I found the Unix SunOS and AIX systems and liked them far more. I learned that multi user systems went back decades but at the time I didn't really know and felt like something very powerful was lost going to these small personal computers with so many memory and operating system limitations. Of course learning about the vast price differences quickly made me realize why.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Ok my story. I touched real a VAX/VMS system exactly once. Was working as a sysad at an aerospace concern in the mid 90s. There was an old curmudgeon scientist named Norm with a comb-over who so-far refused give up his VAX—much to the chagrin of the IT dept. :-D He finally did, but not yet on this day. I came in to his office one summer, probably to help with a Mac or PC, and was intrigued by the unique machine. He let me poke at it and look around. Not sure what I expected... some kind of mainframe kind of thing? To my surprise was a graphics terminal with the X Window system running along with the CDE desktop. Believe the main box was in a lab somewhere else. Kinda blew my mind because I had recently tried CDE out on a cheap Lintel PC I had in my office. Slackware? Maybe had seen it on a Sun as well. (Was a great place to work and learn, the "UN of computers" I called it.) So it was familiar in that sense. Started up a character terminal and poked around. Had the crazy prompt [SYS$FOO...Bar] or something and verbose uppercase commands. Had versions numbers in the filenames after semi-colons. I think there was very good help system as well. In total, a fascinating combination of archaic sophistication. Unfortunately, a lot of great ideas from the old days were lost in the drive to standardization. I think I preferred VMS' named volume approach also taken on Amiga, Netware, and limited in DOS/NT. (Been on Unixen for decades now, so don't hate the single root, but find it less obvious where I am.) On the other hand, later I read ESR's take of VMS and it wasn't all that positive: https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#vms https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#vm...