> 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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.