What did Richard Stallman have against VMS?

Question

Richard Stallman of course was an advocate of free software, and VMS was proprietary, so he would've disapproved of it on that basis alone. (To be clear, I am not discussing here whether he was right or wrong, only the historical facts.)

But I came across this fascinatingly elliptical remark on https://www.tech-insider.org/vms/research/1982/0111.html suggesting that he also had some technical criticisms:

From: Richard M. Stallman <RMS at MIT-AI>
To: info-vax at SANDIA

The deficiencies of VMS I described two years ago,
which are in the file RMS;VMS > on MIT-AI,
as far as I know have not been fixed.
They add up to a lot of problems with trying to make
a multi-process command environment (such as is used
on ITS and Twenex) to run on VMS, plus lots of assorted
uglinesses and things that can't be done.

A Google search turned up no sign of that file. I would be interested in just what his criticisms were.

Answer 1

I have access to the file RMS; VMS 7 dated 1980-07-12. I can't make it public, but I can read it and I believe it's ok for me to paraphrase and summarize it.

RMS argues VMS lacks several important features, and suggest he fix it by adding them himself, working together with a VMS expert he names. The feature list is:

• Access to multiple processes for users.
• User-space device drivers, like ITS.
• Improved terminal control.
• Adding pipes.

Answer 2

A Google search turned up no sign of that file.

I'd be surprised if a search would turn up anything as RMS;VMS indicates a local file on his account on a machine called MIT-AI. Likewise a reply to this file was located at RWK;VMS on the same machine, so it's been an internal exchange at the MIT AI lab. This is very early Usenet.

I would be interested in just what his criticisms were.

Hard to say, but the discussion this got inserted to was raging on usenet newsgroup FA.info-vax with arguments about VMS being closed source, not easy to change and behaving strange on terminal input, while Unix was considered less capable, more responsive to change but lacking important tools. So it came down to spending big bucks on VMS to get a turnkey system for less IT savvy scientists vs. Unix being cheap but needing a well-paid system hacker to keep it running the way an department needs.

Of course, RMS' arguments may have been different from what was mentioned here.

Some of the posts can be found on this gopher.

A few tidbits may as well be found in Lars Brinkhoff's ITS-Archives covering the same time frame.

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Historical Remarks:

• These messages are so old, they are still in A-News format.

• At first Usenet had no hierarchical structure. All groups starting with FA. were gated from Arpanet. The 'Great Renaming' in 1985 turned FA.info-vax into comp.os.vms. With the decline of Usenet hard core comp.os.vms users moved in December 2008 to a mailing list called ... well .. 'info-vax' which is still quite active today (2021).