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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2021-06-02 kl. 09:23, skrev 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...

We have 1 core and 4 GB RAM, and the system is quite fast.
And I do not consider a system supporting production in the main
factory of a leading producer of forrest/garden equipment, as "small".

So no, I do not beleive in that solution.