FreeVMS - An Open Source VMS Clone

I've recently been required to use OpenVMS as part of my day job. Since I haven't used a VMS-like operating system before, I decided to do some research on it.

Although the name would appear to indicate otherwise, OpenVMS is not actually open source. Additionally, it is only available for VAX, Alpha and Itanium systems, meaning that it is not possible to run it on the more common x86 and AMD64 systems home users are likely to be using.

However, I've discovered that there is another version of VMS currently in development, called FreeVMS. FreeVMS is designed to run on AMD64 processors and (according to Wikipedia) is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.

The idea of OpenVMS/FreeVMS rather reminds me of the UNIX/GNU story. FreeVMS version 0.4 is currently available as a QEMU disk image, for anyone interested in trying it out - however, I ran into errors when I attempted to extract the files from the freevms-img.bz2 file, so I have unfortunately not been able to try it out for myself.