AT&T Joining OSF

[Barry Shein]

>Rubbish. First of all, it's "VMS", not "MVS". And, DEC ships sources in 
>micro-fiche format *free* with every major release, and machine-readable
>source is available for those who want to pay for it. Which, is
>a whole lot more open than Sun, for example.
>
>    - Rich

Rubbish indeed.

Read the section on VMS sources in the Digital Desk Reference Guide
(published by DEC, several 3 inch binders describing all products.)

First, you are basically correct about the fiche, I'm talking about
machine readable sources.

There is no guarantee that the sources provided will compile and
certainly no guarantee that, if they compile, will compile into
anything corresponding to a DEC release version of VMS.

The price includes no language compiler sources. They are separate
and similarly priced items (so you get this list of $45K items.)

The sources do not include DECNET sources, they are not available at
any price as far as I could tell, this seemed to be confirmed by my
queries to DEC.

Although this seems less important these days at the time I last
seriously looked into it VMS sources required about 500MB of disk and
a kernel rebuild reportedly took a standalone 780 overnight.  Again,
this is probably no big deal anymore but as someone who did UNIX
kernel and utility remakes on a whim on a time-shared machine hearing
that I would probably have to dedicate a few hundred thousand in
equipment to do any realistic work dampened my enthusiasm.

Basically, my point is, that DEC never intended there to be source
sites for VMS and they were very rare. Last time I tried to find any I
found a handful, two or three in the United States. Their intentions
were successful for various reasons.

Needless to say this is not the case with Unix although specific vendors
of course can vary those policies. As a matter of fact, last I checked
DEC was quite reasonable about the sources to Ultrix, so it's not a
corporate flame here, just that VMS was never designed to make sources
available to customers, Unix was.

	-Barry Shein