Posts: 5 Location: South Carolina Joined: 21.07.08
Posted on November 18 2011 03:55
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?
Were you an "early adopter" of new releases? Did you submit either official or unofficial bug reports? If so when? To whom? What was the issue?
The detail and the more information we have the better in building the case.
Thanks for listening and I look forward to getting this information.
Much of what is keeping VMS relevent to our users is coming out of the efforts being made to port "open source" applciaitons to VMS. The existing HP product set for web sites is several years stale and missing ciritcal components:
MYSQL - we have installed from JFP's site. The fucntionality is reasonable, there are some bugs and it is relatively slow.
PHP - while HP provides a prot of PHP it is very incomplete. Mark Berryman has used the HP code as a basis for porting PHP to V5.3.6 with almost all of the most used extensions, e.g. MYSQLI, CURSES, etc.
SAMBA - prior to HP making SAMBA available wiht the name of CIFS, such was ported to VMS and used as a viable replacement for Pathworks.
Using the above we have been able to extend the usefullness of our AXP and Itanium systems as well as retain and expand our VMS customer base.
With PHP, MYSQL, and CWS (APACHE), we have been able to install many of the most widely used open source web applications:
The following work "out of the box":
JOOMLA - CMS software
WordPress - CMS software
MediaWiki - backbone software of Wikepedia
WebERP - Accounting and ERP system
The major problems that we encounter involve performance and the cost of VMS based systems, bioth hardware and software.
We have been very pleasantly surprised with the performance of the VAX emulators on PC's. Such enable us to run applications that are difficult to port or vest to AXP.
The performance of the new Itanium systems even the entry level blade systems is spectacular. The dearth of good sales and performance information is holding the sales of these systems back.
malmberg August 04 2022 No more VAX hobbyist licenses. Community licenses for Alpha/IA64/X86_64 VMS Software Inc. Commercial VMS software licenses for VAX available from HPE.
ozboomer July 20 2022 Just re-visiting.. No more hobbyist licenses? Is that from vmssoftware.com, no 'community' licenses?
valdirfranco July 01 2022 No more hobbyist license...sad
mister_wavey February 12 2022 I recall that the disks failed on the public access VMS systems that included Fafner
parwezw January 03 2022 Anyone know what happened to FAFNER.DYNDS.ORG? I had a hobbyist account here but can longer access the site.
gtackett October 27 2021 Make that DECdfs _2.1A_ for Vax
gtackett October 27 2021 I'm looking for DECdfs V2.4A kit for VAX. Asking here just in case anyone is still listening.
MarkRLV September 17 2021 At one time, didn't this web site have a job board? I would love to use my legacy skills one last time in my career.
malmberg January 18 2021 New Hobbyist PAKs for VAX/VMS are no longer available according to reports. Only commercial licenses are reported to be for sale from HPE
dfilip January 16 2021 Can someone please point me to hobbyist license pak? I'm looking for VAX/VMS 7.1, DECnet Phase IV, and UCX/TCPIP ... have the 7.1 media, need the license paks ... thanks!
