[Info-vax] A new suggestion to handle the temporary production licences problem

[Andrew Brehm]

On 31/05/2021 21:54, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <s92qfa$7o3$1 at dont-email.me>, Dave Froble
> <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
> 
>> My idea is the same as it's been for years.  Do away with license PAKs,
>> allow anyone to run VMS, require support for any commercial use of VMS.
>> This would avoid all the issues about drop dead dates.
> 
> How would you actually check whether commercial users had support?  Big
> commercial users?  Sure.  Commercial users with one VMS system left?
> Probably not.  And what about other people offering support, openly or
> not, in return for money?  Could VSI prevent that?  Yes, someone who
> needs important patches will pay for support.  But if you are relying on
> that, then you will have unpatched VMS support in the wild at least
> among non-commercial users (or, rather, all who don't want to pay for
> support, whether commercial or not).  But old systems which haven't been
> touched for years or decades probably won't be patched anyway.
> 
I think all of that is too complicated.

Perhaps the easiest distinction between commercial and non-commercial use is system specs.

Make OpenVMS freely available to everyone and let it use up to 4 cores and up to 8 GB of RAM for free, then demand payment for more.

This will allow everyone to use VMS for development and testing and will make serious customers pay. Likewise, if VSI goes away or someone forgets to renew support, VMS would simply collapse to using 4 cores and 8 GB only, keeping production system running but very slowly. This would allow customers to react and pay but not lose everything if they don't.

 From my point of view the second-most important requirement for VSI is now after supporting existing customers gaining new customers. And new customers simply cannot be gained if licensing is too complicated or too harsh. Who wants to switch to a system that will stop running if not paid again?

(This would mean that customers requiring only small VMS systems could run it for free. But how many of those are there and are they not maybe someone VSI wants to be on-board and perhaps expand later?)