[FreeVMS] UserMode VMS on *Nix.

[Bill Pedersen]

As far as a tool for collaboration I think this is decent and it can be
"private":

	http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html

It is not as good as Google Wave as far as interactive collaboration but it
will give us a location where we can have a discussion and also cooperate in
the development of ideas.

Bill.

Bill Pedersen
CCSS - Computer Consulting System Services, LLC
211 Ruth Drive
Gaffney, SC 29341
Telephone: 864-490-8863
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www: www.ccsscorp.com
Skype Name: william.a.pedersen
LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/billpedersen 

-----Original Message-----
From: John E. Malmberg [mailto:malmberg at Encompasserve.org] 
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 1:51 PM
To: Tim Sneddon
Cc: BERTRAND Joël; Bill Pedersen; Keith Parris; Frédéric BOYER;
freevms at systella.fr; Bruno Ducrot
Subject: UserMode VMS on *Nix.

On 6/16/2013 12:00 PM, Tim Sneddon wrote:

Tim, I am basically in full agreement with your analysis.

I chose Linux over BSD simply because of perceived market share, and the
knowledge that LAT and DECNET are available in some state.

I would want a version that runs on my current laptop as a VM under
virtualbox, and one that I could run on one of the desktop systems that I
need to repair.

> The real killer will be emulators.  Why move to the "new VMS" when the 
> "real VMS" can be run on an emulator faster than real hardware anyway?

Exactly.  But the emulators are not yet faster than the high end hardware
though.  But that is only a matter of time.

Basically the existing VMS commercial users that can use emulators are going
to use them.  The ones that can not are already preparing to move off of
VMS.

The ones that move to Linux based emulators or to Linux may adopt standalone
features that augment them from a project like what we are investigating.

So that and hobbyist is probably our target market.

So I think that we need to have a list of deliverable packages that can be
linked together.

I think that we should bundle an open source emulator into it.  SimH/VAX is
stable.

But I do not know about ES-40.  Is it usable at all?

There are hacks that we can make to the emulator and to VMS running on it to
make it run even better.  And you can bet that any hacks that we developed
will be picked up by the commercial vendors.

> Lastly, I think we need to pull together a list of absolute base line 
> goals of the project and start working out from that.  I made my 
> project decisions based on quite a bit of research I did personally  
> over a few months (between work and everything else...).  I am happy 
> to re-visit all this with a new collection of minds.
>
> These are the first two goals I would like to put forward:
>
>      * User-mode public API compatibility.

	Is the goal to be able to build any program on HybridVMS and
         also have it work on a real VMS system?

         My take is no.  This would be like a 10.x API, where old
         programs could be built on it, as a forward migration.

        There are some obvious bugs in the system services.
        I would prefer to clean them up, but provide a compile time
        macro to support the incorrect interface to make them cleaner.

	I would tend to implement system services in an object
         oriented way with a backward compatibility layer.

>
>      * Open source (preferably BSD or GPLv3) licensed source code.
	Curl uses a more unrestricted open source license than BSD or
	lGPLv3.

        * *Nix/VMS interoperability.  NFS/NTP/ODS2/ODS5/LAT/DECNET etc.

Is there a google docs tool that could be used to help organize these
options?

Does anyone have a list of existing VMS compatible packages on Linux and BSD
that can be used either as a base or to help decide on which platform?

Regards,
-John