<p>ⓒ Richard Levitte</p>
http://journal.richard.levitte.org/tags/opensource/Richard Levitte's journalikiwiki2013-06-11T08:26:49ZR.I.P. VMShttp://journal.richard.levitte.org/entries/RIP-VMS/2013-06-11T08:26:49Z2013-06-11T08:26:49Z
<p>The news today, provided by The Register, is that <a href=
"http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/">HP
has decided to put an end to VMS</a>.</p>
<p>Somehow, the only thing happening in me is a sigh and a silent
final goodbye. I think I've seen this coming for years, even though
not very consciously... it's been ages since I wrote a single line
of <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIGITAL%5FCommand%5FLanguage">DCL</a>,
it's a couple of years since I last logged in on a VMS machine... I
think I personally let VMS die a long time ago, a slow death.</p>
<p>VMS is worth remembering, though. In many ways, it's a fantastic
operating system. Not for the command line, but for the internal
functionality. In my mind, nothing beats the system services
provided, nothing beats the $QIO and events functionality, it was
possible to write a completely event driven program with just a few
lines of code.</p>
<p>My life with VMS started 1989/1990, when I landed a part time
job as a system manager. Shortly before, I had fallen in love with
GNU emacs, and was amazed that there was a pretty damn good port of
version 18.55 for VMS. That was a somewhat aged version, though,
and I knew that I wanted to be able to use version 18.59 that was
the current version at the time. So I started working on porting it
and sharing the results, and enhancing things that I wanted to work
better than before.<br />
In a few years, I had learned OpenVMS (Digital renamed the
operating system to indicate that it got POSIX certified), grew
into a good system admin as well as programmer, dived into the free
software/opensource community and gained some fame for working on
and maintaining the port of emacs for VMS.<br />
A few years later, I started enhancing the port of SSLeay for VMS,
later to become the port of OpenSSL. This lead to a job, further
enhancements of OpenSSL and a membership in the OpenSSL development
team, and somewhere along the way, I became fairly good at writing
code that would build and run smootly on multiple operating system
families (OpenVMS and Unix, first of all).</p>
<p>In the end, I can't thank VMS enough. It provided me with an
entrance to so many things that shaped me for some 20+ years, and
has been fun to play with and work with for many of those
years.</p>
<p>Today, it's like finally parting from a friend that I've seen
slowly fade away over a few years.</p>
<p>Goodbye, friend...</p>
'Why I do open source development', indeedhttp://journal.richard.levitte.org/entries/doing-open-source/2010-11-07T15:31:58Z2010-11-07T15:31:58Z
<p>On <a href="http://www.thomaskeller.biz/blog/">dead fish</a>,
Thomas <a href=
"http://www.thomaskeller.biz/blog/2010/11/05/why-i-do-open-source-development/">
tells a story</a> where <a href=
"http://www.metaprog.com/blogs/about/">Joseph Pelrine</a> (who I
understand is a fantastic coach of <a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum%5F%28development%29">Scrum
(development)</a>) compared doing open source to having an
affair...</p>
<p>... and I'm going "say <em>what?????</em>"</p>
<p>'cause I actually feel a bit insulted by the comparison, and it
really does imply a kind of thinking that could be said in just a
few words: "<a href=
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All%5Fyour%5Fbase%5Fare%5Fbelong%5Fto%5Fus">All
your brain are belong to us!</a>" (said with an ominous voice). It
also implies that a company I work for has anything to do with my
free time.</p>
<p>Mind you, I've always made it clear to anyone I've worked for
that I do work with open source on my free time, and it has never
been a problem, some have even encouraged me to do so on work time,
for the simple reason that their benefit was greater than without
it (one company was making a piece of software that was based on
<a href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a>, on which I worked
quite a lot at the time).</p>
<p>In his blog entry, Thomas gives quite a lot of good reasons why
working on open source is a good thing, not just for him
personally, but also for whoever he works for, in terms of
knowledge he brings in to the company and the connections he makes.
To that, I'll add a larger view, which is the greater good, where
knowledge comes to people in a way that would be difficult
otherwise. There are a lot of good programmers out there who have
had a lot of training through open source, training that they would
perhaps not have had otherwise. And finally, wide spread knowledge
as well as all kinds of connections between people bring forward
the development of humankind.</p>
<p>Having this reduced to an affair... I lack more words on the
matter...</p>