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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/22/2019 2:04 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 11/22/19 1:29 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> 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.

The specific wording of the license would determine whether it was
unclear or not.

I have not seen it, so I have no idea.

You sort of managed to make it unclear in your description above.

"A license was granted to run old versions of the OSes on a specific
emulator"

and:

"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."

are not the same. Is it the specific emulator or who owns the
IP of an emulator or both that is the criteria in the license.

Arne