[Info-vax] OpenVMS hobbyist license renewal.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2021-01-29 15:31:46 +0000, leorams56 at gmail.com said:

> I am just interested in VAX/VMS, not OpenVMS and from John's post I 
> understood that the license issue is with OpenVMS...

Quick history of VAX/VMS-related product naming...

MicroVMS became known as VAX/VMS about ~thirty-five years ago, just 
before that VAX 3400 became available.

VAX/VMS was renamed OpenVMS VAX ~thirty years ago.

That renaming contemporary with the release of OpenVMS AXP, later 
itself renamed OpenVMS Alpha.

Then came OpenVMS I64, OpenVMS running on Itanium processors. That 
didn't get renamed.

More recently, a port of OpenVMS to x86-64 is underway with the first 
beta available and the second beta due 2021H1.  The name of the OpenVMS 
x86-64 port might or might not change prior to production release.

For this case? That MicroVAX 3400 requires V5.0-2A or later, and that 
software was known as VAX/VMS and OpenVMS VAX later on. That MicroVAX 
3400 can run OpenVMS VAX V7.3, though whether or not the Operator 
Training Simulator apps can support the final OpenVMS VAX release 
remains to be determined.

> In 2014 we (I on bahlve of our company) purchased an OpenVMS Hobbyist 
> Kit, delivered on CD/DVD, but I cannot find it anymore. Maybe it has 
> later been made available for download.
> 
> For now I will be concentrating on converting the MicroVAX 3400 into a 
> SIMH environment and try to get it up and running, just to preserve a 
> legacy software development.

Pass this whole decision along to your management and preferably in 
writing, lest you become the person to be held individually responsible 
for violating a software license agreement: get your company lawyers 
involved, and ask them what they think about your planned usage of the 
hobbyist license here. During a hypothetical financial or licensing or 
risk audit or some legal action, do you believe that your company won't 
blame you and/or fire you for creating a problem?

HPE Financial Services (HPEFS) still had available licenses for OpenVMS 
VAX, when this was last discussed. The license PAKs were reportedly 
~USD$500 each, and these are permanent licenses.  Irrespective of 
whatever justification you might post here for what seems commercial 
use of non-commercial licenses, the non-commercial-use hobbyist 
licenses you seek terminate at the end of this year. So even if y'all 
seem to continue to risk your jobs by violating a software license 
agreement as can be inferred, there are no more OpenVMS VAX hobbyist 
licenses past this year.

HPE did have a process for legal license transfers from an older to a 
newer system, though there was a license transfer fee involved 
including when switching from VAX hardware to emulation. That license 
transfer would involve a discussion with HPE (and probably specifically 
with HPE Financial Services HPEFS folks) about your migration from this 
MicroVAX 3400 DSSI configuration over to SIMH with official HPE 
licenses.

If your company management won't pay for the license transfer or won't 
pay for HPEFS for licenses for use with SIMH, you'll want to prepare to 
retire the MicroVAX 3400 whether running newer OpenVMS VAX or older 
VAX/VMS) when it fails, and preferably with whatever backups happen to 
be available. That preparation preferably with Standalone BACKUP or 
using OpenVMS VAX booted from another system disk or from the bootable 
root or from the distribution media, and not the usual online backups.  
Folks here can help you get these backups for archival purposes, if 
you're not familiar with Standalone BACKUP or booting from a different 
OpenVMS VAX installation, and the BACKUP-related tasks.

For those following along at home that don't subscribe to the SIMH 
mailing list, here's a related discussion of this same topic: 
https://groups.io/g/simh/topic/your_note/79739479?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,20,2,0,79739479 


BTW and entirely FWIW, there seems to be a certificate issue with your 
company's website.  That, if I've found the correct website. Here's 
some info on fixing that; on certificate requirements: 
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210176


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC