[FreeVMS] Wanted

[BERTRAND Joël]

	Hello,

	I have checked this morning and there are more than 1000 subscribers to 
this mailing list (even with hp.com mail address). HP says that, today, 
it remains only 2500 OpenVMS customers. Thus, a lot of VMS users read 
this mailing list.

	Development was stalled for two years because I don't want to continue 
alone. I'll restart this project if and only if new contributers support 
parts of this OS. Haiku, ReactOS, Linux, *BSD are much more complex than 
a clone of VMS over microkernel and are actively developed for years. If 
we cannot found some developers to participate to this project, I 
suppose that OpenVMS will be definitely dead when HP will stop support.

	I have shown that it is possible to write a kernel as a sum if L4 
servers. 0.4 boots until process management but as pager is missing, it 
cannot launch tasks in virtual memory (sigma0 only maps physical memory 
in virtual memory without address translation).

	Now, HP has announced OpenVMS death. I don't think that OpenVMS will be 
opensourced, and even if HP opensources OpenVMS, there will be a lot of 
stuff to obtain a usable operating system (Bliss, Macro32 and 64 have to 
be ported on new architectures). I'm not sure that rewrite a new OS is 
more difficult.

	Today, FreeVMS 0.4 requires :
- a pager (FreeVMS/sources/freevms/vm/vm_pager.c)
- some drivers (console, hard disk, network)
- a swapper
- a command line
- some volunteers to keep webpages alive.

	If anyone is interested, please answer to this mail. With more than 5 
new and active developers, I think we can restart this project.

	Regards,

	JKB