[Info-vax] State of the OpenVMS hobbyist program?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 11/22/19 1:29 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2019-11-22, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> On 11/22/2019 8:19 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>>> Even if David doesn't care about the legal issues, I hope he realises
>>> that comments like this harm the chances of a VSI hobbyist program
>>> ever existing when people look at the above types of comments and
>>> wonder if trying to provide free access to VMS to hobbyists is worth it.
>>>
>>
>> David is TOTALLY legal.  The VAX license was bought and paid for,
>> registered in my company's name.  Alpha developer license is legal.
>>
> 
> I said nothing about what you do in your business David. I have assumed
> that you use normal paid for commercial licences in your business.
> 
> I was purely referring to your comments about what you feel it is
> acceptable for hobbyists to do in some circumstances.
> 
>> I do care about "legal", and the rights of vendors.
>>
>> What I'd rather not see is VAX/VMS becoming unusable by hobbyists.  Why
>> should such a thing happen?
>>
> 
> For the same reasons that the legal situation around hobbyist licences
> for the PDP-11 have become unclear.

The hobbyist license for the PDP-11 has never been legally unclear.
A license was granted to run old versions of the OSes on a specific
emulator.  That emulator was written by Bob Supnik when he was an
employee at DEC and it was apparently done as a part of his job as it
was recognized as DEC IP.  When Bob retired and left DEC he was given
that IP and it ceased to belong to DEC and thus ceased to meet the
requirements of the Mentec License Agreement.  No version of SIMH
since Bob's departure from DEC falls under the license and no real
hardware ever did.

Other than commercial licensing, which seems to have ended with the
demise of Mentec, there have been other license grants.  I know, I
had one.  Mentec granted me a license to run older versions of PDP-11
OSes on real hardware at the University I worked at for educational
purposes.  Just like the infamous Mentec Hobbyist License that license
ceased to be valid when I left the University.



bill