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.
rbanffy|1 year ago
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.
icedchai|1 year ago
kristopolous|1 year 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
Locutus_|1 year ago
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.
rbanffy|1 year ago