kaiser@jaws.DEC (Pete Kaiser 225-5441 HLO2-1/N10) (11/26/84)
You can buy UNIX sources and hack them. You can buy VMS sources and hack
them. Much cheaper, you can buy VMS microfiche.
---Pete
KAISER%JAWS.DEC@DECWRL.ARPA, KAISER%BELKER.DEC@DECWRL.ARPA
{allegra|decvax|ihnp4|ucbvax}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-jaws!kaiserhenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (11/28/84)
> You can buy UNIX sources and hack them. You can buy VMS sources and hack > them. Much cheaper, you can buy VMS microfiche. Hacking microfiche is difficult and joyless. -- "Make mine machine-readable!!" Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
kaiser@jaws.DEC (Pete Kaiser 225-5441 HLO2-1/N10) (12/04/84)
>Henry Spencer: > >> You can buy UNIX sources and hack them. You can buy VMS sources and hack >> them. Much cheaper, you can buy VMS microfiche. > >Hacking microfiche is difficult and joyless. True. To put more clearly what I meant to say in the first place: If you want to hack source code for your operating system, that option is available under VMS as well as UNIX. Most places simply choose not to hack VMS. I deal with some that do. If most don't, it may have to do with several things: (1) VMS sources are a significant expense. (2) There is an established mechanism for reporting problems to Digital. (3) Problems visibly get fixed, and there's an established open mechanism for setting priorities on many kinds of problems. Perhaps VMS installations, more than UNIX installations, regard it as more cost-effective to have DEC support what they sell; it will be interesting to see -- if it's possible -- what proportion of DEC's ULTRIX-32 customers buy and modify the sources. If UNIX installations find it cost-effective to hack sources, that may have to do with what they pay for the sources. Does anyone have figures at hand for the prices to both academic and commercial users of UNIX and VMS source code in machine-readable form? Naturally it's ideal to have the full source code for your OS (and, for that matter, for everything running on your system ... dream on ...), but if for some reason you don't buy the VMS source (I'm assuming it's real money), you can still get a lot of mileage out of the microfiche in terms of understanding what the system does, and learning from existing code. The microfiche is pretty cheap. I'm under the impression that there's no such thing as "soft sources" for sale for UNIX at a lower price than "hard sources". Am I mistaken? ---Pete kaiser%jaws.dec@decwrl.arpa, kaiser%belker.dec@decwrl.arpa {allegra|decvax|ihnp4|ucbvax}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-jaws!kaiser
God <root%bostonu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> (12/06/84)
RE: Buying and hacking VMS sources... I started to look into this to as we had some significant misfeature problems under VMS, like no CBREAK mode (ie. no XON/XOFF while passing chars reads, we want to use things like EMACS over our flow controlled tty net.) It seemed to me that: a) Yes, it is expensive but that's all relative. b) It's more than you think, as it is written in a few languages and you have to have and support all those languages just for this one purpose (eg. BLISS) c) I heard (tell me if I'm wrong) that a sysgen from source can take many many hours on a 780 and basically requires all those to be standalone. (I guess we could call buying a spare 780 just another expense.) In sum, the Turing Tarpit beckons, yes, you COULD do anything. The real point is that VMS was never MEANT or DESIGNED to be source supported by users as UNIX certainly is designed to be. Similarly, you COULD put the VMS manuals on-line but they were never designed to be on-line and would require something much more sophisticated than the UNIX 'man' command to make it useful. It's funny, TOPS-20 is widely source supported and the only thing that seemed to kill it was DEC, certainly not the users or the source sites. I am truly sorry VMS got off to such a bad start, but denying it's historical legacy doesn't fix it. -Barry Shein
ian@utcs.UUCP (Ian F. Darwin) (12/11/84)
>> You can buy UNIX sources and hack them. You can buy VMS >>sources and hack them. Much cheaper, you can buy VMS >>microfiche. >Hacking microfiche is difficult and joyless. True. To put more clearly what I meant to say in the first place: If you want to hack source code for your operating system, that option is available under VMS as well as UNIX. Most places simply choose not to hack VMS. I deal with some that do. If most don't, it may have to do with several things: (1) VMS sources are a significant expense. (2) There is an established mechanism for reporting problems to Digital. (3) Problems visibly get fixed, and there's an established open mechanism for setting priorities on many kinds of problems. The three reasons that you mention may be true. However, in addition I would propose that one major reason more people hack UNIX than VMS is that it's much easier to hack a system written in a programming language than, paraphrasing Kernighan, having to `grovel around in the mud in Assembler'. At least when I looked at VMS sources around 1980 it was all in assembler; I doubt they've switched to PLS in the interim :=). -- Ian Darwin, Toronto {ihnp4|decvax}!utcs!ian