[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/13/18 8:16 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2018-12-14 00:48:21 +0000, Scott Dorsey said:
> 
>> But it starts somewhere, and free licenses is a good start.
> 
> Apparently I was unclear.
> 
> There have been free educational licenses for ~twenty years.

Longer, actually.  CSLG was in use at the University I
worked at when I arrived  30 years ago.

> 
> There are free educational licenses available now, and from from HPE for 
> older releases and VSI for current releases.

I wasn't aware that VSI actually had a program.  Anywhere I can
read the details of the license?  I would be curious because
haviong talked with them about it when I was still working at
a University I know the HP one was a disaster the terms of which
were ignored by the few people left to use it by that time.

> 
> The CSLG educational program provided customer support access, and that 
> program was discontinued many years ago.
> 
> Yes, free licenses on the production x86-64 release might interest some 
> folks.   In ~2020; as that release arrives.  Prior to that, OpenVMS is 
> probably a curiosity at best. 

By the time it got booted out of my department, it was not even a
curiosity any more.  More of an annoyance.

>                               That assuming the folks involved have the 
> hardware or are inclined to contend with emulation.

We had the hardware.  Was not considered worth the space it took
up or the power it consumed.

> 
> There's a whole 'nother meta marketing discussion lurking here, around 
> licensing program awareness.
> 
> To initiate a vendor-specific degree-granting program or a trade school 
> job-training program, most any school is going to want more than media 
> and download codes and a rack of free servers.  Servers that'll probably 
> quickly be running Linux too, but I digress.  The folks responsible for 
> the program are going to want funding for staff, and installation and 
> hardware support, and sundries.

I am  not sure even that could get VMS back in the game.  Time
to accept that the ship has sailed.

bill