Subj:   RE: Old VMS-on-Mach working sources
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Bill tells me there's nothing in there more recent than has been
widely available on listing CDs from 5.4, no network stuff, no
clusters, basically no security. In short, a VMS-ish environment
with nothing that'd make it commercially usable. The plan more or less
would be to use the GPL with it, so anyone using it would have to
release source code along with binaries. Thus it couldn't be taken
and commercialized by anyone else, though the sorts of folks that
now do FreeBSD, Linux, etc., could add to it.

Bill's original message points out that the prototype "does not include any
networking, clustering, management, or security aspects of OpenVMS, and is
based on VMS 5.4-3", which makes it pretty hard to see how anything
vital would be there. MACH is freely available already of course,
and none of the licensing stuff was ever in there either.

The GPL (gnu public license) is pretty restrictive in what anyone can
do commercially, since stuff under it must be made available in source
and any derivative packages if distributed at all must include source
code or somewhere where the sources can be obtained free of charge
also. Someone might run a business supporting it...there are outfits
like Cygnus who sell basically support services for Gnu stuff now...
but if someone wanted to make a commercial competitor to VMS, they'd
take a huge risk even looking at this code. The free-vms discussions
are by people interested in a free VMS-ish environment anyway.

If of course someone writes a nice tightly integrated package for
it, such a thing might be possible to fit easily into our "real"
VMS, thus allowing us to more or less "get features free", though
those features might have to go into a [.freestuff] type directory
if that were done. That's a bit pie-in-the-sky.

I'd not be surprised if someone added some kind of networking in,
but it'd be more like a 3rd party tcp/ip package, since there isn't
much RMS type functionality in the prototype either...Bill describes
it as some very rude 'n' crude hacks. Obviously with it coming from
5.4-3, nothing of threads is in there either. The censor list from
the listings omits only less than half a dozen pieces, one being
about threads and the others about licensing as I recall. None of
that stuff is even in there, and the rest has been widely
available. I can't imagine how anything that's a trade secret could
be revealed by this.

But it'd be a DAMN fine stalking horse to get folks interested.

Glenn Everhart