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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.'"
There might be a few insights in that old code worth preserving...
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Last time I heard VMS had never been hacked. Is that still the case?
It was the best OS I ever worked with. It'd be nice if they open sourced it.
Indeed, what will their customer use now?
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.
I'm not surprised that it took HP so long to figure out
SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN.COM
on the whole O/S.
After all, it has a dollar sign in it and they're not particularly astute with cash lately.
I sense a really insignificant disturbance in the force as if a few voices suddenly cried out in terror and then went back to stroking their beards.
There were few operating systems that handled loose-clustered networking as elegantly as VMS. Want to centralize user credentials? Easy, just place SYSUAF.DAT on a shared volume. And since the files could have structure, you could lock individual user records for editing rather than the whole file.
Another great feature was the concept of "quorum". Quorum, as in the organizational term of the number of people present at a meeting necessary for it to be an official meeting of an organization, was the number of reachable hosts necessary to conduct business. Say you had a redundant banking site - and the link between them would go down. If they are a redundant configuration, they would continue to process transactions - with their database quickly diverging. Using quorum nodes, you could set up three hosts on three sites - two major server setups and a simple workstation somewhere central - and voila, no single point of failure.
Besides, there is a magnificent book, "OpenVMS Internals and Data Structures", which so elegantly and wonderfully describes operating system design.
I really, really hope that OpenVMS could be open-sourced and this codebase might serve as the base for a community-written x86 port.
toresbe
When the amount of development your OS gets suffers "compared to HP-UX" you are in astonishingly deep trouble. I have had three run-ins with HP-UX, first in 1998, next in 2004, and finally in 2010 (when my current job retired all it's existing HP servers and moved to Solaris). When I encountered HP-UX the first time, in 1998, it seemed to be at least 10 years behind the times. Very little had changed in 2004, which meant that it was falling farther and farther behind each year. In 2010 it seemed little better than it had been in 2004, and I guess that management agreed, since we finally cut the cord and moved on to something that was, at least by comparison, more up to date.
I also used OpenVMS in the early 2000s, and it was capable, but idiosyncratic (record structured files were a PITA, and the file versioning was no replacement for proper version control. I really liked logical names, however, and the global symbol table was useful). It had a head start on lots of other OS's with respect to clustering features (cluster wide file system, message queues, and distributed lock management was all built-in), but much of the userland was GNU stuff ported over on the POSIX layer. DEC seemed to have given up on the whole "innovation" thing and was just milking existing big contracts.
just a ghost in the machine.