[Info-vax] VAX VMS going forward

[Simon Clubley]

On 2020-07-17, Terry Kennedy <terry-groups at glaver.org> wrote:
> I would expect to see someone pull a rabbit full of non-expiring VAX
> hobbyist licenses out of a hat sometime shortly before or after the HP
> final expiration date. There are a large number of people capable of easily
> doing this. The issue becomes how someone anonymously and untraceably makes
> these available to the community. 
>

I'm sorry Terry, but to even suggest this is badly irresponsible and outright
wrong.

> I have no idea if this is still the current status, but it is the latest
> I could find on copyright.gov:
> https://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/librarian_statement_01.html
>
> Note exemption number 3: "Computer programs and video games distributed
> in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media
> or hardware as a condition of access." That may be applicable to the
> current situation.

No it isn't. You have no legal right to run the VAX/VMS distributions
other than the rights granted to you on a temporary basis by its current
owners.

Your argument is just another take on the abandonware argument and the
abandonware argument has been shown to have no basis in law.

If you truly believed differently, you wouldn't be speaking above about
anonymously and untraceably creating licences.

Even if you don't consider it from the ethical/legal point of view then
consider it from the practical point of view:

What the hell do you think certain people at VSI are going to think when
they see this discussion while trying to decide whether to launch a
hobbyist program and in what form ?

You have no rights to free access to VMS other than the rights granted
to you by HPE and now VSI. It makes sense for VSI to offer such access
as a way of boosting VMS use, but not if people think they can take such
access and use it for whatever they want and forever.

Seriously people, knock it off. VAX/VMS access is probably dead as of
1-Jan-2022 and unless you knock this off, so might be hobbyist access
to the other architectures that VMS runs on.

If you don't care about the ethical or legal points of view, then care
about that.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.