[Info-vax] VMS Hobbyist Program

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/21/2020 1:04 AM, David Goodwin wrote:
> On Saturday, July 18, 2020 at 2:52:48 AM UTC+12, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 7/6/2020 7:24 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
>>> 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.
>> 
>> Maybe. Maybe not. That depends on exactly what was approved years
>> back.
>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> Unlikely.
>> 
>> The people with authority to make such decisions are focused on
>> HPE's bottom line.
>> 
>> If you can show XXX or maybe just XX millions of extra revenue, 
>> then they will be listening.
> 
> Why did they they issue a two year license at the start of this year
> when they announced they were ending the hobbyist program? Where was
> the extra revenue in that?
> 
> For that matter, why were they issuing Hobbyist licenses at all these
> last few years? OpenVMS was a dead operating system they were trying
> to get out of supporting. Where was the revenue in maintaining the
> hobbyist program?
> 
> If they were truly focused on nothing more than HPEs bottom line the
> hobbyist program would have been shutdown the day they announced they
> were killing OpenVMS.
> 
> I'll admit its unlikely anything will change but perhaps the hobbyist
> program survived as long as it did simply because someone with
> sufficient authority liked it and wanted it to continue whether it
> was making money or not?

The most likely reason why the hobbyist program continued is that
nobody at the high level cared about it - maybe they were not even
aware of it. Long time ago some SVP or CxO approved it, and then
it just dropped off the radar screen while reorg followed
reorg.

I cannot imagine the hobbyist program people reached out to
some SVP or CxO to get approval for the increase in duration.
Way more likely that they looked at their original approval
and did what they think was best for HPE and VMS within those
constraints.

Arne