[Info-vax] VMS Hobbyist Program

[David Goodwin]

On Saturday, July 4, 2020 at 12:13:18 AM UTC+12, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2020-07-02, David Goodwin wrote:
> > Any chance of contacting someone within HPE and getting permission to continue issuing hobbyist licenses for their versions of VMS? I'd really like it if my VAXen could continue to run VMS but at this stage its looking like they're destined to run BSD or probably more likely nothing at all from 2022.
> 
> That's not going to happen unfortunately. Someone within HPE would have
> to do an analysis and signoff on this and there's no motivation for HPE
> to spend the time, resources and legal costs to do that.

Given how many rights HPE has already transferred to VSI I'd think simply allowing them to issue non-commercial licenses to the old stuff would be a fairly quick and trivial decision. 

IIRC originally hobbyist licenses weren't even issued by DEC/Compaq/HP but were handled by someone else (montigar?) so transferring the responsibility back out of HPE to VSI or elsewhere wouldn't be unprecedented. 

> > Or even better, seeing has HPE doesn't intend to financially benefit from HPE OpenVMS beyond the end of this year it would be great if they could just post a single non-expiring non-commercial set of licenses for everyone to use going forward. I never understood why they insisted on going to the effort of issuing fresh licenses for each hobbyist each year but whatever their reasons surely they don't apply anymore.
> 
> The hobbyist renewal requirement was a way of tracking hobbyist use (IIRC)
> as well as a way of introducing a barrier to reduce the chances that
> someone would use them in production use (also IIRC).

Thats certainly not required anymore. Presumably whoever authorized the two year hobbyist licenses issued earlier has enough power to authorize a 100 year hobbyist license, or one that just doesn't expire at all.

I wouldn't think use of hobbyist licenses in production is much of a concern at this point either. Especially not for old HPE releases which are going to be entirely unsupported soon anyway.

Surely saving old DEC/Compaq/HPE OpenVMS releases for ongoing hobbyist use is achievable if the right people can be contacted.