[Info-vax] The VSI Hobbyist program is Live!

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 29 July 2020 02:05:40 UTC+1, David Goodwin  wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 at 11:35:59 AM UTC+12, Chris wrote:
> > On 07/28/20 23:23, David Goodwin wrote:
> > 
> > > Yeah, this is more just reducing friction. Why bother potential users with extra work when its not actually required? Why make users renew their licenses every year? Is there actually a good business reason for doing this or is it simply being done because that's what DEC chose to do 20+ years ago.
> > >
> > > Given its being given away for free why not just bake a non-expiring non-commercial license into the ISO and just have a link to download the ISO on the website? Its a better experience for all involved.
> > 
> > Have no plans to use vms in the near future, but am grateful that VSI
> > have done this and the registration requirement is not an issue. Had
> > to do that for years to get copy of Solaris. Let's the vendor keep
> > track of how many are interested and provides a marketing point for
> > for possible follow up. It's a business, right ?.
> > 
> > Still, some always moan because it's not exactly what they wanted,
> > free or not, but just seems a bit petulant and childish to me...
> 
> I'm not arguing from a "this isn't exactly what I wanted" perspective. I'm fine with filling out the form and installing PAKs and the current registration process is an improvement over the old one.
> 
> No, I'm arguing from a "competing with Linux is really really hard so lets make the new user process as painless as possible" perspective. And at least under the OpenVMS releases I've used entering license PAKs on a new install was anything but painless. Once you have the system up and running renewing the licenses wasn't so bad provided you did it before the previous ones expired but its still a chunk of work that I've never seen a good reason for.

Your comparisons seem flawed on various grounds.

VMS isn't competing with Joe Random Linux.

Is it competing with Red Hat? Is actual RHEL downloadable for free? Not 
as such, as far as I know. Rebranded/debranded variants, maybe. That may 
or may not change following RedHat's takeover by IBM.

Is it competing with Suse Linux? Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 
requires registration and an activation code, even for a "free trial". 
Until recently OpenSuse (freely downloadable, no registration) and SLES 
weren't guaranteed to be derived from a common codebase. Now they are.

Anyone here remember the joys of FlexLM?