Trying to build a case for Benefit of OpenVMS Hobbyist Program being beneficial to HP

[Bill Pedersen]

I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
HP and OpenVMS. But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
from this program. My hope in this process we can work toward getting
access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community. No guarantees, but I
have to try.



So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
have you ported? What utilities have you developed? Where are they
published? What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
test programs?



Thanks for listening and I look forward to getting this information.



Bill.



Bill Pedersen

CCSS - Computer Consulting System Services, LLC

211 Ruth Drive

Gaffney, SC 29341

Telephone: 864-490-8863

Mobile: 408-892-5204

Facsimile: 866-394-9148

www: <http://www.ccsscorp.com> www.ccsscorp.com

Skype Name: william.a.pedersen

LinkedIn Profile: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/billpedersen>
www.linkedin.com/in/billpedersen

[abrsvc]

It may be hard to come up with a dollar amount of value to HP. I use
the hobbiest system for research for general debugging techniques and
general experimentation. I recently used a hobbiest system to attempt
a port from Alpha to I64. The result of that test, allowed me to
better estimate the magnitude of another porting project. Please note
that the experiment was for a series of my own programs and not for a
client. This was perhaps somewhat of a gray area, but there was no
monitary gian by me as a result of that effort.

In the longer term, the availability of the hobbiest licenses allow
those of us with the time and hardware to become familiar with other
languages and products. This again will allow us to better serve the
OpenVMS world. It can be argued that this is monitary gain as we
generally get paid for our services, but those services are delivered
on the clients' machines and not using ours.

Overall, the hobbiest program provides incentive for the secondary
market of hardware, the continued exposure of OpenVMS to the
population in general and perhaps potential sales for HP should an
OpenVMS solution be the correct one for a client. As an example, I
showed a client that a current DS10 had be up and running for over
1000 days. The stability of that system helped to persuade them to
choose an OpenVMS solution. This resulted in a few thousand for HP in
licenses alone. Maybe not much, but these can add up.

Dan

[Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson]

Bill Pedersen wrote:

> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported? What utilities have you developed? Where are they
> published? What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?

I have used hobbyist licensed systems (Deathrow) for personal experi-
mentation and have therefore experience with the system I would not
have otherwise.

A concrete example would be my C++ templates for error handling of
Posix calls. There are #ifdefs in it for VMS and the HP C++ com-
piler.

http://my.opera.com/myrkraverk/blog/2010/11/10/posix-error-handling-in-cxx

I refer to the PosixCall.h++ file in the download section at the
bottom.


P.S. This blog does not contain the complete library as I have it
now.

--
Johann Oskarsson http://www.2ndquadrant.com/ |[]
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services --+--
|
Blog: http://my.opera.com/myrkraverk/blog/

[Steven Schweda]

On Nov 16, 11:06 am, "Bill Pedersen" <peder...@ccsscorp.com> wrote:

> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a
> great asset to HP and OpenVMS.

I agree that the program benefits HP. HP apparently
disagrees, or believes that the costs outweigh the benefits.

> [...] I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program. [...]

What, exactly, does this mean? You haven't observed any
such value? Someone at HP hasn't observed any such value?

> [...] what Open Source applications

> have you ported? What utilities have you developed? Where
> are they published?

http://antinode.info/dec/index.html#Software

Contributions to:
http://curl.haxx.se/
http://www.info-zip.org/
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/
http://www.kednos.com/kednos/Open_Source/MMK
http://openssl.org/
http://www.vim.org/

(Probably some others, if I looked harder.)

But, really, if in the past year HP hasn't figured this
out, then I don't see much hope for a change. In my case,
other considerations also argue against continuing to use VMS
for my primary workstation+server. For example, on Alpha,
there's no modern Web browser. (SWB 1.1.12 on Alpha can't
even post a message on HP's new user forums, and even for
read-only tasks, on an XP1000 they're hopelessly slow.) On
IA64, there's no audio support. Only inertia keeps me using
VMS as a workstation OS, and I can't justify running a VMS
server and some more modern/useful OS on a separate
workstation, when an OS like GNU/Linux can serve both
purposes. I'd like to think that my loss of interest in VMS
would matter to the folks in charge, but if their only
interest is in the cash I pay them, of which there is none,
then there's apparently not much I can do about it.

[Jim Hopkins]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:06:58 -0500, Bill Pedersen wrote:

> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS. But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program. My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community. No guarantees, but
> I have to try.
>
>
>
> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported? What utilities have you developed? Where are they
> published? What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?
>
>
>
> Thanks for listening and I look forward to getting this information.
>
>

Bill, I have not done any of that, but having the ability to run OpenVMS
as a hobbyist on a non-production system has certainly improved my OpenVMS
administration and programming skills.

I was scared to touch VMS when I first started my job, but after getting the
hobbyist license, installing the simh emulator and OpenVMS on top of that,
(and BREAKING it on more than one occasion) I'm now comfortable with daily
administration and I know where to go for answers when there's something I
don't know how to do.

I guess you might say that benefits me, not HP - but I'm far more likely now
which in turn make me more to recommend to my boss and upper management that we
continue using OpenVMS.


Jim Hopkins

[VAXman-]

In article <pan.2011.11.17....@swbell.net>, Jim Hopkins <bwan...@swbell.net> writes:
>{...snip...}

>Bill, I have not done any of that, but having the ability to run OpenVMS
>as a hobbyist on a non-production system has certainly improved my OpenVMS
>administration and programming skills.

Perfect! The Hobbyist program provides a "sand-box" for learning VMS
and VMS skills that a production environment would not provide.

>I was scared to touch VMS when I first started my job, but after getting the
>hobbyist license, installing the simh emulator and OpenVMS on top of that,
>(and BREAKING it on more than one occasion) I'm now comfortable with daily
>administration and I know where to go for answers when there's something I
>don't know how to do.

And, again, learning VMS skills you wouldn't otherwise be able to on a
production systems.

>I guess you might say that benefits me, not HP - but I'm far more likely now
>which in turn make me more to recommend to my boss and upper management that we
>continue using OpenVMS.

It does benefit them. It's fostering and creating knowledgeable users,
knowledgeable admins, and knowledgeable programmers who will want to use
and buy VMS. Otherwise, the monies go to buy Micro$oft virus collector.

--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

All your spirit rack abuses, come to haunt you back by day.
All your Byzantine excuses, given time, given you away.

[Jim Hopkins]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:20:54 -0600, Jim Hopkins wrote:


> I guess you might say that benefits me, not HP - but I'm far more likely
> now which in turn make me more to recommend to my boss and upper
> management that we continue using OpenVMS.
>
>
> Jim Hopkins

What the hell - that's not even a sentence! But you get the idea.

Jim

[Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson]

VAXman-, @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:

[ Does the hobbyist program benefit HP? ]

> It does benefit them. It's fostering and creating knowledgeable users,
> knowledgeable admins, and knowledgeable programmers who will want to use
> and buy VMS. Otherwise, the monies go to buy Micro$oft virus collector.

Or <insert commercial linux distro here> or not at all by using
<insert your favorite no-cost linux distro here>. There are even
more options such as FreeBSD, OpenIndiana or *gasp* Oracle Solaris,
IBM Aix and I believe OS X, just to name a few non-Linux systems.

Without in-house knowledge of VMS, componies are very likely just to
get rid of it. There are also factors such as external (unrelated)
tech support putting pressure on it. It's way to common for people
to blame something they don't know if anything's wrong. I know of
a one case where the tech support of an accounting software firm con-
vinced its customer to switch out a Novell server (happily running for
three years on straight with updates) simply because they were (or in
this case, this one tech support guy) hiding their own ignorance.

The management was happy to switch, I mean, wasn't Novell just some
ancient unsupported junk? (This was in 2005, btw) Then the bills
started to come in. Not only for the new hardware, or the server
license, but the really huge bill (considering the size of the com-
pany) for support such as setting up the Windows server. Of course
it was in no way possible for the accounting software firm to support
or recommend Linux because they didn't have any in-house knowledge of
that either.

"So, are you running the database on VMS? Sorry, it must be VMS' fault
that our database-client application is doing something wrong. Switch
it out for <insert Linux distro> and it'll work again."

Wait wat?


In other news, I'm currently starting on a small personal project that
I'm very likely to publish as open source which doesn't help me at all
if I can't run it on Deathrow. Well, until Deathrow goes away.

[Mark Benson]

On Nov 16, 5:06 pm, "Bill Pedersen" <peder...@ccsscorp.com> wrote:

> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS.  But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program.  My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community.  No guarantees, but I
> have to try.

The ability to access and to learn OpenVMS has allowed people like
myself, who are
totally new to the entire platform and OS, to grab a copy and get
stuck in. The ability
to learn these skill in your own time using your own hardware with no
deadlines or
pressures makes learning OpenVMS a much more attractive experience.
This guarantees
people will keep coming into the market in numbers and learning the
key skills needed
to run and maintain the systems HP is selling and supporting.

Linux gained a lot of foothold with the market because it is freely
available to learn.
Solaris used to be the same, but sadly is now no longer freely
available. OpenVMS
stands as an example of how to do it 'right', too. These endeavours
have put people
out there with the skills required and that keeps a platform going
forward.

--

Mark Benson
http://dectec.info

[Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson]

Mark Benson wrote:

> Solaris used to be the same, but sadly is now no longer freely
> available.

It is under the name OpenIndiana; the successor of OpenSolaris.

[joukj]

Bill Pedersen wrote:
>
>
> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported? What utilities have you developed? Where are they
> published? What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?
>

> My contributions to porting Open-source software can be found at:
http://nchrem.tnw.tudelft.nl/openvms/software2.html

Jouk

[JF Mezei]

Bill Pedersen wrote:
> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS. But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program. My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community. No guarantees, but I
> have to try.

You forgot: what bugs have we found early and reported under the table
to HP (since Hobbysists can't formally report bugs) that got fixed
before some enterprise customers got bitten ?

[Doug Phillips]

On Nov 16, 11:06 am, "Bill Pedersen" <peder...@ccsscorp.com> wrote:

> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS.  But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program.

Challenged by whom?

>  My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community.  No guarantees, but I
> have to try.
>

Some things are of such obvious benefit that to question their worth
is a blatant display of ignorance. HP's management seems to
demonstrate this trait.

> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported?  What utilities have you developed?  Where are they
> published?  What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?
>
> Thanks for listening and I look forward to getting this information.
>

Why was the Hobbyist program started in the first place? I'm sure
someone saw the benefit and made its case or we would never have had
such a thing. The same arguments that were made then still apply.

Why were patches once freely available to everyone with a valid
license? There must have been some reason. What has changed since
then, other than management?

If more people know about a product, use that product, and the product
is seen to be good, stable and well supported, then that's good for
everyone involved with that product, isn't it?

If that well-known product is easy to buy, competitively priced and
guaranteed to work as advertised, then more people will buy it, won't
they?

If any product has competition that fits the above but is hard to buy,
overpriced and has no guarantee that it will work the way it's
supposed to unless you spend more money, why would anyone buy that
product over its competition?

VMS was never intended (by its owners) to be an OS for the masses
(although it certainly could have been), but someone at some time saw
the benefit of making it available to hobbyists and providing patches
to licensed users that kept it stable and working right. It was
probably those same people who realized that many students in
universities would someday graduate and make buying decisions for
businesses.

I guess those far sighted people with common sense are all gone from
HP and we're left with a group with me-now mentality.

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Those bugs "never happened"! They are products of your fevered
imagination. ;-)

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <mailman.22.1321463230.2...@rbnsn.com>,

"Bill Pedersen" <pede...@ccsscorp.com> writes:

> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS. But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program. My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community. No guarantees, but I
> have to try.

OK, we'll give it a go, despite some REALLY DEPRESSING stuff I heard
second-hand recently. But I won't dwell on that for now. One more
chance.

> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported? What utilities have you developed? Where are they
> published? What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?

While SMS, Dave Jones, Hunter Goatley etc have certainly done admirable
work here (some of which HP makes use of), I don't think this is the
main value hobbyists offer. Rather, I see two areas of emphasis.

One is testing stuff. Many big customers don't install new patches
right away unless they are really, really important. Many hobbyists do,
for various reasons. They don't have millions to lose if something
goes wrong. Problems become noticed sooner. Probably, someone with a
support contract who a) is interested and b) can reproduce the problem
logs a call, but the real work was done by hobbyists.

Back when I was doing a lot of Fortran programming, I wasn't a hobbyist
per se but was using a campus licence, but otherwise it was a similar
situation (no high-level support etc). When the Fortran 90 compiler was
new, there were a few minor bugs. I reported them, they got fixed.
While I might still be able to find an inofficial channel for support
(though I'm sceptical), no access to new software means no chance of
finding anything. This saved DEC/Compaq at least some face since bugs
might have been fixed before a big customer noticed.

Another one is grass-roots evangelism. While VMS has mostly disappeared
from academia, for a variety of reasons, its presence among hobbyists
kept it known in some circles (say, Info-Zip). People with experience
as hobbyists sometimes move on to become paying customers. Such people
used to be supplied by academia, but that is no more.

I don't know if they just don't get it or are intentionally ignoring the
situation in academia. At a DECUS meeting a few years ago I saw a map
with little flags everywhere there was a DECcampus (or whatever it is
called now) licence being used. In one case, I knew it was one solitary
VMS die-hard where, just a few years before, all students had VMS
accounts. Saying that VMS is still alive in academia is an
understatement. But maybe senior management sees just these maps.

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote 2011-11-17 23:14:
> In article<mailman.22.1321463230.2...@rbnsn.com>,
> "Bill Pedersen"<pede...@ccsscorp.com> writes:
>
>> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
>> HP and OpenVMS. But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
>> from this program. My hope in this process we can work toward getting
>> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community. No guarantees, but I
>> have to try.
>
> OK, we'll give it a go, despite some REALLY DEPRESSING stuff I heard

> second-hand recently...

No no, I'm not interested at all... :-)

Was that under NDA ?
If it was, maybe you'd not write that at all... :-)

Was it depressing in regard to the hobbyist program in
particular in regard to OpenVMS at large ?

["Roßert G. Schaffrath"]

On 11/17/2011 2:51 PM, Doug Phillips wrote:
> Why was the Hobbyist program started in the first place? I'm sure
> someone saw the benefit and made its case or we would never have had
> such a thing. The same arguments that were made then still apply.

That would have been John Wisniewski who was a VMS Ambassador and got
the program rolling. Sadly he passed away in 2004. We were colleagues
briefly back in the 1980's working for Hamilton Computers. I was with
the Chinese division in New Jersey and he was with the domestic division
in Dallas. Gave me my first internals book and a TK50 loaded with
interesting tools.

[VAXman-]

I believe it was Pat Jankoviak who planted the seeds for the VMS Hobbyist
program.

Sad about John. Great guy.

[JF Mezei]

At the time of the demise of VMS Engineering, it was Sue Skonetski who
was in charge of the hobbyist programme.

Not sure if the person who took over from her took "ownership" of that
responsability or if she just heard about it and not sure what that
programme is all about.

As long as licences can be renewed ever year by David Cathay (or is it
Cathey?), then I am OK. I have no expectations that HP will do anything.

My remaining VMS boxes are no longer accessible from the internet so I
am not worried about all the stuff that is vulnerable due to lack of
patches.

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <ja43rp$ci6$1...@news.albasani.net>, Jan-Erik Soderholm

<jan-erik....@telia.com> writes:

> > OK, we'll give it a go, despite some REALLY DEPRESSING stuff I heard
> > second-hand recently...
>
> No no, I'm not interested at all... :-)
>
> Was that under NDA ?
> If it was, maybe you'd not write that at all... :-)
>
> Was it depressing in regard to the hobbyist program in
> particular in regard to OpenVMS at large ?

Again, I don't want to dwell on it---I think we should concentrate on
helping Bill. In brief, though: I heard from two different people about
discussions at the Technical Update Days in two different countries
where the subject of patch access for hobbyists was raised. At least
during these two discussions no progress was made.

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <4ec5ea2f$0$21304$c3e8da3$12bc...@news.astraweb.com>, JF

Mezei <jfmezei...@vaxination.ca> writes:

> As long as licences can be renewed ever year by David Cathay (or is it
> Cathey?), then I am OK. I have no expectations that HP will do anything.
>
> My remaining VMS boxes are no longer accessible from the internet so I
> am not worried about all the stuff that is vulnerable due to lack of
> patches.

Of course, there are reasons for patches other than fixing internet
vulnerabilities.

[Craig A. Berry]

Bill Pedersen wrote:
> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS.

It's rather sad that this is considered a matter of personal belief
since the benefits are so numerous and so objectively obvious to anyone
paying the slightest attention.

> But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program. My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community. No guarantees, but I
> have to try.

Thanks for trying. The return has to be measured in terms of
capabilities and opportunities that would otherwise have been lost.

Where I work there are no system managers or even full-time OpenVMS
people -- everyone's primary responsibilities lie elsewhere. Yet about
two years ago now we made the transition from Alpha to Itanium with no
outside help and no significant problems. I don't think that would've
happened had I not had lots of prior experience installing, upgrading,
and configuring my hobbyist systems, including an Integrity rx2600,
which allowed me to learn the basics of the EFI console.

In fact, without the hobbyist program and my involvement in it, there's
a good chance no one at my company would have even known there was this
new thing called Itanium and that HP was making new hardware that would
run OpenVMS. Gosh knows it was impossible to buy HP hardware from HP
even when we knew exactly what we wanted, but I digress.

I think it's highly probable that were there no hobbyist program, we
would still be nursing along the old AlphaServer 2100 with fingers
crossed until the end of time. But since, thanks to the hobbyist
program, I could run my own systems at home, I had been running them,
and maintaining them, and paying attention to new developments.

I suspect there are many thousands of small VMS sites around the world
that will never upgrade for the lack of one semi-knowledgeable person
in-house who knows what's involved or at least where to go for help.
The hobbyist program can be a very effective counter-measure, as my case
demonstrates.

> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported?

There would be no Perl on OpenVMS without the hobbyist program. I've
been the primary maintainer of the VMS port for quite a few years, which
means this includes the old 5.8.6 version HP still distributes as well
as later versions (current is 5.14.2).

The record of what I've done is publicly available in Perl's version
control system:

<http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=craigberry>

While I use Perl occasionally at work, I have no time to maintain it
there, so this is all work I do on my own time and on my own (hobbyist)
systems.

Aside from being ubiquitous and powerful and something that a lot of
other software depends on, Perl is also extremely well-tested. I do
several builds a week of the latest development code, and each time I do
I run the test suite, which has over 2,000 test scripts for a total of
over 450,000 tests. This has shaken out a number of bugs and
limitations in the CRTL over the years. If I remember correctly, it
also exposed a system crashing bug in the first public beta of OpenVMS
on Itanium.


I also maintain the VMS port of FreeTDS (<http://www.freetds.org/>),
which is a client library supporting the tabular datastream protocol
(TDS), which is what Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server talk on the wire.

The original port of FreeTDS was something I did as a hobbyist and as a
bit of a curiosity. Well, to be honest, it was more than curiosity; I
had a premonition that we might get painted into a corner and I wanted
to prepare for it, but I had no charter or work time to spend on it.

As time passed, the Sybase servers that our VMS system at work was
talking to switched to Microsoft, and then Sybase discontinued VMS
support, and then the Microsoft servers were being upgraded to a new
version which changed the TDS protocol.

So my premonition came true. Suddenly it was critical that we have
drop-in replacements for the old Sybase clients that could talk the new
version of the protocol and interact with the new Microsoft databases.
I took off my hobbyist hat and we did a small emergency project to add
VMS-style command syntax on top of the FreeTDS utilities I'd ported as a
hobbyist; our problem was solved. Eventually, after putting my hobbyist
hat back on, I polished up that work and sent it back upstream so it's
now available to everyone.

> What utilities have you developed? Where are they
> published?

Perl and FreeTDS include OpenVMS build support in the standard source
distributions. Both of these projects have given me commit bits,
meaning I can push my changes into the official repository without any
begging or pleading.

I've also updated Joe Meadows' UAF utility and made it available here:

<http://code.google.com/p/jmuaf/>

> What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?

Hmm. I downloaded and installed the GNV 3.0 beta kit. I confess to not
having done much with it after I discovered it includes only 16 updated
utilities instead of the 96 new and updated utilities that were being
promised for it a year ago. It looks like if this vitally important bit
of infrastructure is ever going to get the attention it needs and
deserves, it's going to be done by hobbyists.

Sorry this got long.

[Rich Jordan]

On Nov 18, 1:58 pm, "Craig A. Berry" <craigbe...@nospam.mac.com>
wrote:

> <http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=craigb...>

I'll add to Craig's post. FreeTDS is responsible for at least three
of our customers still having primary apps running on VMS instead of
moving to other systems. While I'm not sure of current support status
I know they remained on support contract with HP for years longer than
they would have (I think they still are). Plus one of those sites
moved to from Alpha to VMS Itanium instead of migrating to another
platform.

And Craig is responsible for that package being available to us. Not
HP.

I need to check out the newer versions too, thanks Craig!

[Chip Coldwell]

On Nov 16, 12:06 pm, "Bill Pedersen" <peder...@ccsscorp.com> wrote:
>
> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported?

Xpdf.

http://frank.harvard.edu/~coldwell/vms/xpdf.html

HP even put a link to my site on theirs for a while.

Unfortunately, I'm mostly out of the VMS biz now, so I'm not keeping
it current.

[seasoned_geek]

On Nov 16, 11:06 am, "Bill Pedersen" <peder...@ccsscorp.com> wrote:

> I personally believe that the OpenVMS Hobbyist program is a great asset to
> HP and OpenVMS.  But I have been challenged to show the return to OpenVMS
> from this program.  My hope in this process we can work toward getting
> access to patches for the OpenVMS Hobbyist community.  No guarantees, but I
> have to try.
>
> So I am asking you, the OpenVMS Hobbyists, what Open Source applications
> have you ported?  What utilities have you developed?  Where are they
> published?  What have you done as far as possibly participating in field
> test programs?
>

Quite honestly my friend, you are doing HP's job for it. Once you
identify all of this "free" stuff which will go away once they pull
the plug on the Hobbyist program, they'll be more fervent about doing
it.

You ASS-U-ME HP wants to keep generating revenue from OpenVMS. HP has
proven, most recently by that joke of a team in India and the first
"do not install" recommendation EVER to come out for a VMS release,
that HP has no intention what-so-ever of keeping VMS around past the
end of next year.

[Steven Underwood]

"seasoned_geek" wrote in message
news:fd61383f-8b88-4e54...@n35g2000yqf.googlegroups.com...

>the first
>"do not install" recommendation EVER to come out for a VMS release,
>that HP has no intention what-so-ever of keeping VMS around past the
>end of next year.

Where did I miss this little tidbit of information? Reference please.