VMS Links
A (not conclusive) list of VMS-related sites
Help
OpenVMS IT Resource Center at HP
help forums of the Hobbyist community
OpenVMS Friends at Yahoo
ThinkLink at BrudenOSSG for in-depth technical information
HoffmanLabs Stephen "Hoff" Hoffman's bits and pieces, and hints and kinks on OpenVMS (and other systems). Asking help may well result in an article here. Hoff also hosts and maintains (well, sort of) the Ask The Wizard pages, since the days he was employed by Digital/Compaq/HP.
Product
The official HP OpenVMS portal
- Product information
- Solutions
- Online documentation
- Links to help, freeware (including supported openSource products)
- and a lot of other OpenVMS related stuff (and some other)
Community
- News on OpenVMS, products, patches, jobs
- DCL procedures
- RdB (and other databases)
- Free licenses (assuming you are a member of a user commmunity)
- Ordering Hobbyist CD/DVD (VAX, Alpham Itanium)
- Downloads
Encompass US Previous known as Decus US
- Free (associate) membership - enought for a hobbyist license!
DECUServe online conferencing is the original DECUS sysmgr-to-sysmgr site
- Conferences (using a wrapper around good ol' Notes)
- Older documentation
Freeware and OpenSource
There are MANY sites that offer freeware for OpenVMS - traditional OpenVMS stuff, or ported OpenSource products.
HP's OpenVMS e-business software page contains a lot of links to freeware that may, or may not be supported by HP, but part of this is due for an update!
- web Browsers
- web servers and related software (PHP, Perl, Tomcat)
- Web application software (Axis2, SOAP, XML)
- Developmeen tools (Distributed Netbeans)
- Java
- Security software (most is integrated in OpenVMS)
- and some other stuff including:
Jean-Francois Pieronne's site containing MySQL 4.1.14 and Python and some other packages. This page links to more recent versions (including MySQL 5.1) - and since this is a Wiki as well, all kinds of information can be found from here. There also is a MYSql wiki.
He also has two forums for his products:
MySQL forum on MySQL-on-OpenVMS
Python forum including MoinMoin - this Wiki software
Wordpress a PHP-based blogging program. Versions 2.2.3, 2.3.3 and 2.5 work out-of-the-box on OpenVMS, 2.6 requires reanaming 5 files if you unzip the distribution in a standard way: 5 files conatin a dot in the filename that is replaced by an underscore in unzipping. The only real problem may be that HP's MOD_MySQL extension is built against MySQL 3.x, and Wordpress requires a MySQL 4.1 database. On the MySQL forum you van find an entry how to make a MySQL 4 extension - and one for 5.1. I use this software for my blogs.
PHPMyAdmin is a PHP based database administration program for MySQL. Version 2.8.0.2 runs on OpenVMS without a change. 2.9 may run, I know others use it, but 2.10 does NOT run on OpenVMS... I used it sometimes, when some blog data cannot be altered otherwise.
PHPBB is a PHP forum program, that installs and runs without a problem. I used version 2.0.23 on the site as well, but the big problem is bogus "members", but you can limit the damage a bit using plugins.
Freeware files server of Process Inc. maintained by Hunter Goatley, quite a lot of tools here
3rd party Products
Process offers hobbyist licenses on their products so can run them for free, as long as you license doesn't expire 
- Multiware and TCPWare TCPIP stacks
PreciseMail Spam filter
- PMDF Mail package
- product forums for help
Communigate is a replacement for Outlook, that runs on Unix and has been ported to OpenVMS some years ago. I tested it on my DEC3000. Free for personal use - less than 5 accounts.