HP Discontinue OpenVMS

simpz writes "The register is reporting that 'the ancient but trustworthy server operating system' OpenVMS has been discontinued. From the article: 'HP never really promoted its acquisition and OpenVMS suffered from a lack of development compared to HP-UX, itself suffering from competition from Linux. It was only a matter of time, but it's a sad end. Many of its old-time fans, your correspondent included, cherished a hope HP would move it to x86-64 – but since development moved to India in 2009, OpenVMS has been living on borrowed time. Now, it's run out.'"

Comments

When will it be open-sourced?

[Erbo]

There might be a few insights in that old code worth preserving...

Re:When will it be open-sourced?

[mrr]

HP already put those into a new product: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/management/insight-control/index.aspx

Re:When will it be open-sourced?

[ebno-10db]

Just look to Windows. Just as IBM(rot -1) = HAL, VMS(rot 1) = WNT. VMS and Windows NT were both developed by Dave Cutler (who hated UNIX).

The original Windows NT (3.51?) was a pretty good OS. After the first release though it became Microsoftized. I don't know what Cutler's involvement with that was. However, the real beauty of VMS wasn't so much it's architecture (though that had a lot of good points) but the incredible quality of DEC's implementation. Bugs were for the competition.

"Cutler hated Unix" probably sounds like Neanderthal blasphemy to most Slahsdotters, but there were plenty of reasons to hate Unix in the 80's. The big split (AT&T vs. BSD style), numerous other incompatibilities (later overcome to a large extent by GNU utilities), horribly inefficient, bad security even for (largely) pre-Internet days, and practically non-existent documentation. Take it from an old fart who was there - any Unix of the last 15-20 years is definitely not your father's Unix.

India where projects come to die

[Anonymous Coward]

Its always the same when a huge software project moves out of the EU or US to india its bound to die. India has some great engineers but 90% of those graduating have just memorized stuff and passed an exam which has a pass rate as long as you have 33/100. Obviously this creates a lot of worthless engineers.

From personal experience: One our customers the ESA (European Space Agency) had some servers and storage arrays running on SUN hardware. We just managed the hardware and operating systems. The software/middleware was all responsibility of the customer who had outsourced this part of the job to Tech-Mahindra (and india based outsourcing giant). These guys would mail us asking us how to change their password and how to "copy" a file from the server while having ssh access (and this happend every few days). If you have such guys working on such important systems I don't even want to know whats happening on development level. Its true that in every team you have a few top-scorers but not knowing how to change your password on a unix system and "managing" that system day to day tells me there is something seriously wrong.

Re:India where projects come to die

[Darkness404]

Yeah, it really seems like when it comes to India, their engineers are fine with low-level stuff but when it comes to doing something beyond what they learned in school, they've got no clue. They also don't seem to understand how it all "fits together" and how to actually innovate and make usable features for normal users.

Indians are fine for grunt work, and there are some truly bright engineers there, but too many companies see that they can get 5 engineers for the price of one and think they'll get 5x the productivity... instead they find out they get 1/2 the productivity.