[Info-vax] Hobbyist kits

[John Wallace]

On Mar 5, 10:49 pm, David Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> > I was asked to simply reply to the mail if I was missing
> > download info, so I hit "reply"...
>
> > 10 min later I got the site/url and login info.
> > There is ISO images for 8.4 CD and two LP CDs.
> > Compilers and DECset (ECO1128). Seems to be the latest
> > of everything. There is also the 8.4 update 5 kit.
>
> > Not automated in any way, obviously manualy handled
> > at the moment.
>
> > The mail also said "Please do NOT make this available to others.".
> > So don't ask. I *guess* this is some temporaly solution.
>
> There can be good reasons for not sharing.  Say that one person got the distribution, and
> shared it with everyone else.  You might have people at HP saying to themselves "we did
> all this for one person??"
>
> Another thought is, the more requests they get, the more importance they might assign to
> the hobbyist program.  Or not, maybe someone would say "we should be able to make money
> off this".  Yeah, I'm a pessimist.

There are other ways of finding out who's actually using your software
which are rather more reliable (for various reasons) than just
tracking who's downloaded the kits. You could have some kind of
individually tracked freely renewable licence key that runs out every
couple of years, for example. Hey wait...