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

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <ihopv8Fh2cdU1 at mid.individual.net>, Andrew Brehm
<andrew at netneurotic.net> writes: 

> > 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. 

I can think of many, many commercial applications which could get by 
with far fewer resources, say a webserver running a webshop.  And I can 
think of non-commercial use which needs more resources, such as number 
crunching in academia.

> This will allow everyone to use VMS for development and testing and
> will make serious customers pay. 

Yes.  But many commercial customers wouldn't have to pay anything and 
some non-commercial ones would.

> 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.

Certainly not all production systems.

> 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. 

True, especially considering the competition.  It doesn't matter what 
the actual comparison is, what matters is what the bean-counters 
perceive.

> (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?) 

Indeed.