OpenVMS
Shares rank 51 of 87 operating systems by recommenders
Recommended for its file locking, asynchronous operations, ACL security and long uptime records. Critics note it is proprietary and costs money for commercial use.
Recommended for its file locking, asynchronous operations, ACL security and long uptime records. Critics note it is proprietary and costs money for commercial use.
18 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 8
- approval share
- 56%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fans who like its design
“Both screenshots of Windows 2000 and OpenVMS are in my opinion the peak UI's.”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork” “I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands.”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10” “I like OpenVMS and am slowly learning more about it”
Comment from 3 May 2026 in “Embedded Rust or C Firmware? Lessons from an Industrial Microcontroller Use Case” Reliability, file locking, security
“Proper file locking, asynchronous operations across everything, ACL based security, proper ABI.”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Microsoft blocks trick to unlock native NVMe driver, but workarounds still exist” “VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%)”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Proprietary and costly for commercial use
“VMS has always been proprietary, despite the name, and is still an expensive option for commercial use”
Comment from 25 Sep 2026 in “What Sun got wrong” “It's a bit unfortunate the company behind the OS needs to make money off its licenses though.”
Comment from 19 Jul 2026 in “A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows” “And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “The lost cause of the Lisp machines”
Other operating systems people recommend
The four most recommended other operating systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 87 operating systems, rankedWhat people said
17 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“VMS has always been proprietary, despite the name, and is still an expensive option for commercial use”
“my datacenter runs this vulnerable VMS release on an emulated VAX”
“Sounds like similar paper "win" to DEC OpenVMS lawsuit against Microsoft”
“trying to justify how great the OpenVMS port from Alpha to Itanium”
“I wish they had an easy way to deploy an OpenVMS instance on a cloud service”
“It's a bit unfortunate the company behind the OS needs to make money off its licenses though.”
“Both screenshots of Windows 2000 and OpenVMS are in my opinion the peak UI's.”
“until Open VMS made it yet another UNIX clone”
“I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands.”
“I like OpenVMS and am slowly learning more about it”
“as do the less Unixy z/OS and OpenVMS”
“VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%)”
“Proper file locking, asynchronous operations across everything, ACL based security, proper ABI.”
“I recall OpenVMS's telnet had a problem with newlines/carriage returns so all the text was staircased”
“The results can be insane in the hands of inexperienced folks.”
“And still, like OpenVMS, heavily proprietary.”
“could block the unit forever in OpenVMS just because”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.