[FreeVMS] Difference between freeVMS and OZONe

[Bruce Allen]

Ozone looks like a typical hobby operating system. It just wants to implement some features from VMS.

Remember, writing an operating system is no easy task. All of the OS projects should be applauded - regardless of implementation.


IMHO, FreeVMS wants to create an operating system that looks like VMS at the user level and the operating system services but the internals implementation would be secondary. In other words the extended QIO processor in FreeVMS would most likely be implemented in a different way than it is in VMS. The best way to find out the specifics is to ask the FreeVMS experts.


Most VMS zealots would demand internals level compatibility to be called VMS. This is why UNIX compatibility is so much easier because UNIX is at the user level and no one cares about the internals until things don't work. UNIX internals have been described as a "junk operating system developed my a committee of PhDs."  VMS has an interruptible kernel and UNIX does not. UNIX has threading but don't try to call any RTL calls since most are not thread safe. 

The bottom line is all operating systems take a lot of effort to implement and maintain. Microsoft Windows has to be the hardest OS to implement and maintain since Microsoft has to re-implement it's driver model every few years to purposely break perfectly good hardware and the drivers for that hardware so the owner must buy new hardware and the most baffling is how they managed to get hardware manufacturers to build new hardware that will not work with Windows XP!!! You can't even load a driver under Vista unless you have a special code from Microsoft, which they provide to vetted developers. Microsoft has appointed themselves the protector of digital rights management so they don't want you to load old software OS on new hardware and break DRM.

Microsoft is the best reason to run an alternative operating system.

--
Bruce Allen

Liberalism is a mental disorder...
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