A long, long time ago, there was a project called FreeVMS which aimed to do that. Sadly, it didn't get much further than booting.

Edit: https://github.com/rroart/freevms . It's definitely not big and professional like OpenVMS :-)

Ah, looks like a fork of my friend jkb's work. Used to live on frevms.net, nowadays squatted. ( see https://web.archive.org/web/20110310093558/http://www.freevm... ).

Yeah -- when I saw a redesigned website at freevms.net, my heart skipped a beat, I thought FreeVMS might still be alive. I couldn't track jkb's original tree anymore and figured I'd link to that Github project instead, as it had a few additional commits and, thus, a higher chance of running on more recent emulators.

I'll send him a direct email and keep you informed. Stay tuned :)

update : The reply was: He started a rewrite on L4, but it was too much for one lone guy; he could start it all again if some want to participate.

OpenVMS has an enduring fan base -- maybe who knows enough to make meaningful contributions is reading this!

First, the code around the L4 kernel (Pistachio) is still available. I've cloned it to github here so as to not overload jkb's personal server (still in the origin):

https://github.com/wazoox/FreeVMS

What's missing:

- L4 Pistachio is unsupported...

- Memory management (VMS style) is to be implemented.

- Drivers.

The website is still online somewhere, I hope to know the URL soon :) I'll add it to the github README.