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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Something I didn't know that according to wikipedia, hpux is still being developed. I thought it had stopped with the pa-risc machines being killed off. Anyone here still using it?

Also, apparently, OpenVMS releases are still rolling out as well.

I'm glad these things are still happening but I can't imagine they're profitable. Am I missing something?

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It's definitely profitable in terms of support contracts.

But make no mistake, any place that is still running these legacy systems like commercial Unix (HPUX, AIX), OpenVMS, IBM i (aka OS/400 aka System/38) or mainframes is only doing so because they have to.

HP-UX also ran on Itanium, those were on sale until 2021. No one bought those without a support contract, and probably some guarantee of support for at least 10 years.

If I was at HP I'd push hard for a RISC V port and then try to introduce mirco-hpux, specifically designed to fit within the gaps of server racks, sucking minimal power while providing essential OOB and management features.

They could thrive in that space for at least the next decade

Is there anything specific that makes HPUX particularly suitable for use in embedded contexts? You may as well use Linux or FreeBSD if you need a Unix like kernel for embedded stuff, or a specialised RTOS of some kind.

For it's more traditional markets, years ago they did consider porting HPUX to x86 to keep it alive (alongside other options like buying Solaris as it already ran on x86), but abandoned it for the "going down with the ship" option they did take. Stuff about it came out during the HP / Oracle dispute over Itanium support years back: https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...

I think they do some kind of bare minimum security update release once per year, so "still being developed" is a stretch, they're probably just milking the support contracts. afaict the last server HP-UX will run on ended sales in 2020.

openvms got spun out into a tiny little company and is at least somewhat alive

Right. My imagined reason was they signed ambitious contracts a long time ago that promised some decades of support and they're running it in a way that's less then the penalty they'd have to pay for breaching the contract. This works with the modem Jack Welchified HP.

But again, that's pure imagination.

Hp-ux is essentially dead as of next december. Here is HPE's own roadmap. It transitions into "mature support", but that does not equate to new patches for anything, and other material in the deck indicates that HPE want people to move to one of their server platforms that runs linux or Windows.

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/4aa3-9071enw.pdf?jumpid=in_pdf...

OpenVMS has even been ported to x86-64 architecture.

> Anyone here still using it?

Sadly $dayjob still uses it... it's on a decommissioned server that they supposedly can't shut off yet.

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