After 47 years, OpenVMS gets a package manager (VSP)
11 comments
·March 17, 2025whartung
I wonder if someone could have ported pkgsrc to it, create a POSIXish compatibility shim library (maybe there already is one), and, I wonder how much of the denizens lingering in the pkgsrc would have ported over “for free”.
speed_spread
Congratulations on the new package manager. But despite its name, OpenVMS is still actually not open.
skissane
> But despite its name, OpenVMS is still actually not open.
This is a very anachronistic complaint - DEC renamed VMS to OpenVMS in 1992, and at the time “open” had nothing to do with “open source” since that phrase wasn’t even coined until 1998.
In 1992, “Open” meant “open standards”/“open systems” - support for industry standards instead of proprietary ones - most importantly POSIX. VMS became OpenVMS when it acquired POSIX compatibility. And other vendors used the same branding-IBM offered mainframe POSIX compatibility under the names OpenEdition (MVS) and OpenExtensions (VM)
KerrAvon
It’s not anachronistic to make this complaint about a product still being sold in 2025. The product name is now an anachronism.
tombert
Yeah, that has always confused me. When I first started playing with Linux and BSD, I would see OpenVMS popping up in my searches, only to find that it wasn't actually open.
I'm sure there's legacy reasons for that, but it always sort of annoyed me because I wanted play with it
bitwize
It's "open" in the sense of the Open Software Foundation, OPENSTEP, or OpenGL. Back in the pre-CATB days, "open" meant "developed by a consortium rather than a vendor", or perhaps even just "ported to more than one CPU architecture". This latter sense is what is meant in OpenVMS, as it was ported to DEC Alpha CPUs in the mid-90s.
flomo
I believe in this case, "open" = supports UNIX/POSIX apis.
actionfromafar
And that there was documentation on how it worked.
unit149
[dead]
It doesn't support my VAX!