[Info-vax] Thoughts on VSI Community License Program

[David Goodwin]

On Friday, August 14, 2020 at 5:10:13 AM UTC+12, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2020-08-13, John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> wrote:
> >
> > I got a response on the VSI Forums <https://forum.vmssoftware.com/> to my question about clustering for Integrity.  This is it:
> >
> 
> If they also don't allow clustering in the hobbyist licence for x86-64,
> then that could be a really big mistake. People are more likely to check
> out this new thing called VMS if it's got a unique selling point that they
> can play with free of charge.
> 
> VMS style operating system level clustering combined with HBVS support
> is still unique enough that it might attract people to learning how to
> use it as a hobbyist and then compare it to other clustering solutions
> they are aware of.
> 
> Take those things away and VMS doesn't really have anything unique over
> what you can do elsewhere.

Removing access to the platforms main selling point to try and combat piracy seems like a pretty serious error. Piracy is the very last thing VSI should be concerned with. They would be lucky if piracy was a problem. Right now they're going to have a hard time even getting Linux users to seriously look at OpenVMS at all, let alone consider pirating it. 

Also, they seem to not realise that a company pirating OpenVMS is better for VSI than one that just gives up and runs Linux. A company that's pirating OpenVMS is at least creating demand for OpenVMS experts and software and is a potential VSI customer. The pool of OpenVMS experts and available software needs to be much much larger than it is for OpenVMS to be competitive with linux. VSI is not going to achieve that by inconveniencing the few enthusiasts they've inherited in an attempt to combat something that isn't and probably never will be a problem.

> >
> > I had to go check what he said about the HP license and I was surprised to see that it's true.  It's in the PAK files that HP sent out. I suppose we never looked it over closely when HP took over the Hobbyist program.
> >
> 
> How does that tie in with the text from HPE about how we don't have to
> apply for a hobbyist licence for each machine we are running HPE VMS on ?

I'd say the text from HPE superseded whatever was in the license agreement. When issuing the license HPE provided additional text saying you could use the one license on multiple nodes so it seems pretty clear that's OK to do.