[Info-vax] Eisner's PAKs, was: Re: Can't get hobbyist licenses from Openvmshobbyist

[JF Mezei]

On 15-01-20 12:05, Ian Miller wrote:
> If VMS Software was licensed by subscription licencing rather than a one off perpetual license would that be better? You would pay each year. Perhaps the software would stop working if you didn't.

Perpetual licenses allowed VMS customers to continue to run VMS despite
Palmer, ownership changes, broken promises and abandonment by HP.

VSI may bring a ray of hope for VMS, but lets not kid ourselves, there
is, at present, no proven track record and no indication of whether VSI
will be a short term ".com" company or something that will be
financially succesfull, growing and long term company.

Asking customers for constantly renewed licenses when there is no
confidence (yet) that VSI will survive long term is pretty risky. I
would assume larger customers would require contracts with the license
generator in escrow so it can be made available should VSI cease to
conduct business in order for those customers to continue to run their
business.

Renewed licenses also bring lots of pain to customers for managing the
LMF, unless you develop automatically updated LMF where, if you've paid
renewall dues, all the applicable software sees its expiration date
automatically expended with one simple command (which implies it has
access to internet to confirm renewall, and not all VMS hosts may have
access to internet).