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

[John E. Malmberg]

On 7/29/2020 6:19 AM, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> 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.

There may be restrictions in that they must follow due to their contract 
with HPE.

Their lawyers may have advised to it for the following reasons:

1. It makes it easier to win a court judgement against someone using a 
the community distribution for commercial use.

2. If they do not do this consistently, they may not be able to enforce 
violations of their licensing policy.

The last time I was working on OpenVMS development for what became HPE, 
even internally the licence keys were all time-bombed with 1 year.

I do not expect an answer to those type of questions in the newsgroup.

<snip>>> 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.

I would expect that cleaning up the installation procedure is probably 
lower priority on the list than just getting the x86_64 port at a usable 
parity.

One of my future projects is to test using Ansible to install OpenVMS 
via a network or USB connection to a serial console.

The last time I was doing bulk installs of Microsoft Windows, Microsoft 
was making changes with each release to make those bulk installs harder, 
even using the official Microsoft tools.

They had this interactive GUI wizard for what they callled OOBE, Out Of 
the Box Experience, that they really wanted run manually for every 
Windows user once per PC.

And then Windows 8 added a delayed discovery of the network adapters 
with a mandatory GUI interaction after their install automation script 
ended that I did not find any way to automate before I was changed to a 
different project.

> 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.

RedHat has a developer's license for RHEL linux that is free for 
development use only, and free downloads.  It gives you access to a lot 
of the restricted content from their knowledge base.

It is far more restrictive than the VSI community license as it only 
allows being installed on one physical machine.  You can run unlimited 
VMs of it on that physical machine.  You can only allow other users with 
a RedHat Developer's license to use those instances, which implies that 
it becomes their only system also.  You may not use it for automated CI 
testing.

> 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.

Suse Linux Enterprise server actual licensing terms allows the operating 
system downloaded from SUSE to be freely used with out any activation 
code.   Their older documentation used to say this very prominently.

The activation code is needed to download updates.  So you very quickly 
can end up with an out of date distribution.

SUSE has a free developer's licensing system for non-commercial use, 
that does not appear to restrict how many systems you can use or what 
you do with them as far as it is not for "production" use, only 
development and test.

The major pain point there is that they need to register with a special 
server to receive updates.  You can setup a local server to cache the 
updates.  I do not know any more details as I have not setup that 
server.  It is just too easy to use the OpenSUSE Leap instead.

The OpenSUSE Leap releases appear to come out for the community to use 
and kick the tires of for a few months before Suse Linux Enterprise 
equivalent release comes out.

Regards,
-John