Certaily hobbyist licenses are free, but I have not yet found any method by which reasonably current OS and LP media is available at hobbyist level prices. I managed to aquire V8.2 media and documentation from a company that was moving out of VMS (sad, but so common...), but am now looking for a source of V8.3 cd's. Is there anywhere that disk savesets or cd images can be downloaded ? I cannot get to http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ at this time, midday GMT, so probably long before daybreak wherever the server lives...:-)
There are 'packages'? Hmm. Anyway, for starters go to the "Perl on VMS" page at http://www.sidhe.org/vmsperl/ As for 'other free compilers, how about "gcc"? Look in the OpenVMS FAQ http://h71000.www7.hp.com/faq/vmsfaq_020.html at the sub-sections following "13.2 Where can I find UNIX tools for OpenVMS?"
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There is no indication that the OP is a hobbyist, so let's not narrow his options prematurely. It may be possible to get a single-user C compiler license that's not too expensive. It's almost certainly possible to get a loaner license that's good for some period of time during which you could build up your toolkit and potentially justify the cost of a license if it's proved its usefulness. Talk to your HP rep or a reseller.
There is a Perl 5.6.0 kit that will run on VMS 7.1 available at the sidhe.org site already mentioned. That's now a rather old version of Perl, but depending on what you are doing might be good enough.
As far as gcc goes, it was at one time possible to build Perl on VAX with gcc, but that was eight or ten years ago. The lack of a viable gcc on Alpha caused support for that to dead end. We've never taken out the support that was there, but there have been many, many other developments that would make building Perl on VMS with gcc an uphill battle at this point. As I understand it, Ad a Core Technologies do now maintain some portion of gcc on Alpha and Itanium as part of the infrastructure for their Ada compiler, but as far as I know they don't make a complete gcc package available separately.
I you are in temporarily need for a compiler, there are several OpenVMS systems on the net, where you can get free accounts, which offer a bunch of compilers (e.g. the HP testdrive systems, the deathrow cluster).
