[Info-vax] VSI Hobbyist plans ?, was: Re: VSI OpenVMS Hobbyist Program Announced.

[Terry Kennedy]

On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 11:01:42 AM UTC-4, Dave Froble wrote:
> Good question ...

Here is a note I "threw over the wall" to VSI some months ago:

  Some people have suggested that some sort of telemetry / usage reporting
might be a fair trade for a Hobbyist license. My gut feeling is that any
benefit you might see from that is insufficient to justify the coding effort
to develop the feature in the first place, unless you already had it for 
some other reason.

  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the program should not be such a burden
on VSI that it makes the bean-counters go "why, exactly, are we doing this?"
But simply issuing PAKs as-needed shouldn't be that much work.

  There is also the issue of policing the program for people who are trying
to scam you by not paying for real licenses. There doesn't seem to have been
much of that problem with the HP / Process Software / etc. Hobbyist programs,
or at least enough to worry about. But HP[E] was a much bigger company with a
lot less financial responsibility (class, can we all say "Autonomy"? 8-).
Since you're working through the codebase anyway, having a Hobbyist PAK have
a flag (maybe in product token) that triggers LOGINOUT and friends to report
"Hobbyist license - for non-commercial use only" at login, in batch logs,
etc. would seem to be fine. This could be expanded with additional tokens
that would do things line "Field Test software - not for production use",
"Evaluation software", etc. if desired. There might be enough actual bene-
fit to VSI from those side-effects to make it worth doing, even without a
Hobbyist program benefiting from it.

  For the average hobbyist, the cost of the Hobbyist program should be low
enough (in both time and money - so no 90-day PAKs the way LetsEncrypt does).
Given the price most hobbyists paid for their hardware, the money cost should
ideally be as close to zero as possible.