Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: Bootcamp
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2025 22:59:36 -0000 (UTC)
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On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 17:13:11 -0400, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> What you've posted has been highlighted before. As has porting VAX/VMS
> to the Mach kernel, which actually happened.

Yes, but microkernels are their own amusing little dead-end, aren’t they.

> It also doesn't appreciably move the operating system work forward.
> Ports ~never do.

Funny. If it wasn’t for ports, Unix would be nothing more than yet another 
footnote in that list of interesting museum-piece OSes from the 1960s/
1970s. And Linux would not now run on about two dozen different major 
processor architectures, and be essentially dominating the entire 
computing landscape.

Ports are what make a piece of software portable.

> And there is a vendor that already provides custom solutions based on
> porting parts of the APIs to another platform, with Sector7. What
> Sector7 offers very much parallels Proton and Wine, too.

But Sector7’s offerings seem to be incomplete. For example, I could find 
no mention of being able to offer DECnet support. Which is something 
available on Linux.

> 40 or 50 engineers is far too small for a project of the scale and scope
> of a feature-competitive operating system.

The Linux kernel has something like 1000 active contributors at any one 
time. You can’t compete with that. But why not leverage that power?

> For a competitive platform, I'd be looking to build (slowly) to
> 2000, andquite possibly more. But that takes revenues and
> reinvestments.

Those revenues clearly aren’t there. They might have been if VSI had a 
shipping product five years earlier. So it seems like there is no way your 
suggested strategy would have worked.

> As an example of scale and scope that ties back to Valve and their
> efforts with Wine and Proton and Steam Deck and other functions, Valve
> may well presently have as many job openings as VSI has engineers ...

And remember, Valve didn’t do this on their own. They build on (and 
contribute back to) the work of the existing open-source community.