Hey, Mr. "this was sent from an Alpha" himself! I remember you well from comp.os.vms in '89 thru '93 and a bit later, I used to lurk in that newsgroup daily. I still remember some of the (in)famous DCL scripts you posted that generated hundreds of replies in controversy. But this is not the time or place for such reminisces...

I'd agree with you that OpenBSD will probably never be a winner in any of those categories you listed, but I am still a (mild) fan nonetheless if not for any other reason than for evolutionary diversity. OpenBSD may never become mainstream but some of the code that the OBSD team work on often filter back to the rest of the open source community. Especially the code auditing they do for Apache and other key ports.

VMS is slower than OpenBSD on a comparable system? I haven't tried OpenBSD on Alpha but if you have run OpenBSD/alpha and OpenVMS on the same or similar Alpha server then well done sir, and do you have any metrics to show us?

The problem I have with your statement comparing (default) filesystem for each OS is that they have quite different feature-sets, for instance VMS has file-versioning, and quite extensive access control and access auditing capability. Bash is a very lightweight and simple shell that relies on a lot of (admittedly) standard Unix tools (such as grep, awk, sed, etc) to make it useful. DCL on the other hand has a significant payload of lexical functions. VMS has a batch and printer control system that is leaves unix job and print control way behind, VMS is more akin to a traditional mainframe in that respect. So don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking OpenBSD (I'm a great fan of the secure-by-default nature of OpenBSD) but I just don't believe one can easily compare it to OpenVMS...

Obligatory mention of The Manga Guide to Statistics - see Slashdot review: http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F15%2F1432233&from=rss/ ... although perhaps that is because the book didn't get a very good review, not to mention that the discussion that followed the review article wasn't very, er, academic... and maybe the book is more suitable for 15 year olds rather than 16-18 year olds... Oh well...