Updates to the OpenVMS Community Program | Hacker News Reader

Updates to the OpenVMS Community Program

vmssoftware.com

34 pointsmepian53 comments

So they will give you everything for x64 but are cancelling the Alpha and Itanium versions. The purpose is to have more involvement on the x64 side.

That is logical but they needed to word it better and also put the 'Free for x64' message up front.

VMS has some strengths but the issue is that most gurus are not interested in x64 since the applications they are supporting don't need more speed than is available on Alpha or Itanium. Therefore there is no reason to upgrade.

I'd expect a lot of the hobbyist interest in VMS is specifically people who have vintage DEC boxes and want to run somerhing more "authentic" than NetBSD.

A comment on a retrocomputing forum was along the lines of "the method to generate your own free-use unlimited time licenses on this old hardware has been around for a long time" (followed by a smiley face and "IANAL").

> 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.

Putting aside the substance of this announcement, the way it is worded doesn’t make a good impression. It comes across as “we are disappointed our dreams of getting open source developers to do work for us for free didn’t come to pass”. Talking like that is not encouraging those dreams to come true.

I have never run OpenVMS, but sometimes I daydream about installing it, even having a go at porting some software to it-just as a hobby. But thus far I haven’t got around to it. Hearing this attitude from the company that owns it, is making me think, maybe my “not getting around to it” was fortuitous

I don't think imposing additional restrictions on non-commercial users (or users who wouldn't buy a license anyway) is a great way to increase their sustainability.

> For x86 community licenses, we will be transitioning to a package-based distribution model (which will also replace the student license that used to be distributed as a FreeAXP emulator package). A vmdk of a system disk with OpenVMS V9.2-2 and compilers installed and licensed will be provided, along with instructions to create a virtual machine and the SYSTEM password. The license installed on that system will be valid for one year, at which point we will provide a new package. While this may entail some inconvenience for users, it enables us to continue offering licenses at no cost, ensuring accessibility without compromising our sustainability.

Does this mean that you can download and run OpenVMS, but after a year your VM will stop working and you'll have to download a new one and set it up all over again?

That, plus the fact that they're distributing it as pre-installed images rather than install media, tells me that they're worried people are getting too much value out of the free version, so they want to make sure it's sufficiently crippled that you could never build anything stable or useful on it.

VMS: the rock-solid operating system that'll never crash or go down, at least not until your 1 year license is up and you have to transfer everything to a new VM.

> rock-solid operating system that'll never crash or go dow

`reboot` command has entered the chat

It is a commercial product and it is their goodwill to offer licenses for free. They don't have to do it at all, Mr. Entitled.

Right. Good luck getting new users.

VMS has been dead for decades. If they want to attract new users they should make better choices

Them, like ArcaOS and OS 2200 are living in some wild fantasy land. There's, at least in theory, ways to revitalize these products but it's not going to happen by digging larger moats

More people are probably still using CP/M then all of those put together

Maybe they want to compete for MCP and GECOS users. VMS is the new MULTICS killer.

MCP's Architecture struck me as absolutely amazing and fascinating when i read about it.

Bull released a MCP VM demo development kit, I tried really hard to set it up and write some simple ALGOL for it.

If anything it thought me to appreciate how MULTICS/UNIX (and aside the pdp10 world) gave us line oriented developer-focused interactive environments that don't make ones eyes bleed.

It's no coincidence the villain in Tron is called MCP. As a former colleague who managed an A-series mainframe, MCP is actually very user-friendly. It's just that it's extremely picky about its users.

MULTICs has capability based security, VMS is stuck in the world of access control lists. (But OpenVMS 7.2 runs just fine in the virtual VAX 11/780 in my smartphone)

Sorry. I was being sarcastic.

New VMS users? Why lord would anyone want to do that, they floated some crazy idea of VMS on Intel Atom as a IoT platform as if that made any sense some years ago during the migration trajectory.

Somehow this seems like one of those idea's that many legacy-niche-OS developers imagine themselves in, it's old, uses little memory (and does little) so now it must be feasible as a embedded-OS, AmigaOS-oid developers imagined the same in the early 00's...

However about total amount of users I don't fully agree, there's significant deployments of VMS still around in the infrastructure and finance sectors. Although some very high profile customers have migrated away on to Linux using compatibility layers.

And within that subset there's customers that still have high performance requirements making them willing to invest in VMS on new hardware.

If you ran VMS on a GS1280 (64 Alpha CPU's, split into 2 32CPU partitions), then migrated to several generations of SuperDome's (Itanium) and your work-load is still scaling with your wider company demand, bare metal deployments on latest x86 hardware of VMS can perfectly make sense.

A commercial product that has seen almost no green field development in ages. The only way to make it long-term sustainable is to reduce the barriers to new development.

One thing they could do is to offer it in cloud instances. Let more people play with it, see its strengths compared to Linux, and let it win share on its merits.

The optics of this aren't great - it looks like they aren't fond on people learning its characteristics.

I can't imagine there is much new development. I knew companies using VMS in the casino gaming/lottery industry. They moved on to other platforms, like AIX and Linux, decades ago.

From what I've seen, most of us who applied to the community program to get access to x86-64 when they made it available are still waiting for access.

I actually received email notification today of this change to the community program, even though they never sent me what I need to... access the community program. Something's not working properly on their side, I guess.

You may already have access through https://sp.vmssoftware.com/ ... have you checked? They never notified me after I signed up, but I was still able to log in and download VMS x86-64.

This page requires a password, I don’t think the application form requested one.

If you registered, try resetting your password. I'm pretty sure I had to do that.

Some helpful soul made the same suggestion the last time this came up. And same as last time, I got a "Error 404: Email not found" when I attempted to reset. Which makes sense, since they never confirmed I had a login in the first place.

(the 404 part is funny, though, I think)

Yep, I got the same error.

I've started to notice that the vagueness/terseness of a vendor's subject line is directly proportional with how bad the update will be.

"Updates to our ______ project" will usually mean that the project is shutting down, shifting to a paid model, or is being acquired (after which point we can expect it will switch to a paid model, then shut down)."

"An update about ______ company" in general usually means they're announcing a bunch of layoffs.

"An import notification about _____ accounts" usually means they've been hacked.

You forgot "Advancing our amazing ____ bet"

I had been interested in this, but the community program was so restrictive and half-baked that I never got involved.

I'm not surprised that it failed.

I once did some Linux work for a company that ran everything on OpenVMS. The Operator gave me a tour of the systems, and their functionality. I was BLOWN AWAY. I have always considered it a interesting historical niche that I'd love to experience personally if I got the chance. I'm much more interested in running original hardware than emulation or virtual machines. I've had some eBay and Marketplace searches setup just in case a sale I can't pass up comes through. With this announcement I guess I'll never go down this path.

What functionality blew you away? What part of OpenVMS, architecturally, can not be replicated today on open systems?

BATCH, message facility, zero-headache clustering would be on my list. That stuff just works.

In general having clustering be a core is primitive instead of being tacked on in user land gives you some nice features out of the box. Some can be replicated but with a lot of work from the user

In the exclusive camp we have:

- cross cluster shared memory

In the can be replicated in user land category we have - logicals, env vars with an inheritance from cluster level to process level

- distributed locks

Those two features make something like etcd pointless

- a cross cluster file system that makes nfs look like the hack it is

And finally Linux has finally caught up and passed with iouring, but VMS has had an excellent completion based io model since the early 90s.

> - cross cluster shared memory

Don't you need specialised hardware for that?

Maybe as an extension on MemoryChannel based clusters back in the Alpha days.

But normally OpenVMS clusters are not shared-memory systems, you get shared disks, locks, queues and access controls.

I am not sure about your assessment, I think in large all of the VMS clustering stuff really does exist in the Linux world nowadays but not so much at the operating system level.

And I think perhaps you are overselling also the level at which VMS supports some of these and the performance there-of. Shared memory clustering I don't think is really a thing on VMS actually, unless you mean application state sharing over shared files on disk (which can be cached).

A typical VMS clustered application might look something like this:

Applications runs as multiple separate processes distributed across cluster nodes that access shared disk and queues.

On shared disks you'll have shared persistence used by all the nodes of the applications.

The persistence can be in files managed with RMS (Record Management Services, think 80's sqlite)

The distributed lock manager handling locking at the record level (which can be actual records or text-lines in the file)

Said application might distribute work events around it through OS Queue's that are also shared across the cluster allowing for task distribution across a cluster.

And all of this is fronted by a terminal multiplexer that will round-robin incoming sessions (because most of these systems will be TUI kind of things) to a random node in the cluster.

All of the above are built-in OS services, it's the ultimate monolith :)

.... Now if you equate that to some typical enterprise system this quickly maps across to something like:

Fronted by a http proxy bouncing requests to pods.

Application distributed across pods on K8 Cluster.

Clustered SQL for persistence layer and record services.

Kafka/RabbitMQ for your queue's for event distribution.

All of those services will be significantly more feature rich, performant and if correctly deployed more resilient than a VMS cluster too.

No, it's community's fault! /s

I don't know what their expectations were- most people using the community license probably were happy enough to let their old hobby hardware chug along, and didn't feel the need to write articles or publish software. Looks like they actually released a "partial OpenVMS git" implementation.

> most people using the community license probably were happy enough to let their old hobby hardware chug along,

And the solution for this is, obviously, not force them to brick their toys, but to get more people playing.

Lots of people pay decent money for emulations of ancient hardware in order to experience computing the way it was. Just look at the people running their PiDP's with their ancient software.

I'd totally run DecWindows as a daily driver if I could. It has X and SSH. What else do I need?

I applied to it (developing on exotic platforms is fun after all) but they never even answered.

Same here. I think I actually applied twice. It's strange - they never even answered, but I did receive notification today of this change they're making to the Community Program.

I suppose if I knew the right person I could email them and get access, but I've seen at least one public statement (on their forums, maybe? or twitter?) saying there's a long line because it takes time and manual effort to set up the accounts, which is kind of the saddest thing ever. I guess I'm content to wait in line (forever?).

I got one, but it took months. I'd almost forgotten when, possibly even a double-digit number of months later, a license arrived.

Sounds like two things have happened. 1) They discovered that more commercial use of the free licenses was occuring than they were comfortable with, hence the weird licensing and move to only prebuilt VM images, 2) They realised people were basically using the licenses to keep old hardware chugging along, instead of investing in the platform's future, hence the move to only licensing amd64 in the future.

I can understand it from their perspective, but it's absolutely the wrong move. What they need to do if they really want to revitalise the platform's future is inspire and excite people about the idea of building on it. Not only is this not doing that, it's going to have the exact opposite effect, because now this leaves a taste in people's mouths that building on this platform means building on shakey ground.

Shame, but I don't have a dog in the race except having a soft-spot for alternative architectures.

So as far as the 'retro community', small museums, etc, running on original but old hardware, you're out of luck. You have to run a x64 VM now, or resort to piracy.

They stopped giving out VAX licenses years ago, so this is nothing new, unfortunately.

They want to breathe new life into their software at the same time they want it to die as soon as possible.

I hope they reconsider their decision. It's not like there are lots of VAXes in operation doing actual work.

They probably also realize any hobbyist who wants an "illegal" license can get one with a google search. This announcement is not really stopping anyone from playing around with old software.

It's just sad. If I wanted to develop on Solaris, Oracle will let me download the install media, and I can even deploy the descendants of OpenSolaris for production workloads like Oxide does.

If they want to commit corporate suicide, they are doing it right.

Or run the OS for which you already have media?

Is it time for an open source equivalent of VMS? Something that runs a rewrite of DCL and can compile and run C, Bliss and COBOL programs that make various LIB$ references?

There were a few alternatives, such as various versions of freevms, but also VMS userland on Linux.

https://github.com/rroart/freevms

FreeVMS has been at about 10% completion since 2001

I can't hardly blame them, I imagine they want all their paying customers to get off ia64 and alpha, too.

They will. As magnificent as those machines were when released, I guess my phone has more compute power than them, and that's counting only the CPU cores.

> Over the years, we have proudly offered free licenses for non-commercial use of our operating system across multiple architectures.

I've been on the amd64 waiting list since day 1, and still haven't gotten my hobby license. Frankly I've given up.

I had the same. I filed another application after waiting for months from the email adress of my consultancy company employer and i got a reply within minutes.

I tried again today. No reply yet.

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