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

[Andrew Brehm]

On 02/06/2021 10:41, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> 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.

As cores and RAM become cheaper, commercial applications limited to few cores will become a faint memory.

And academic number crunching IS a commercial application and can justify buying a licence. Why not? VSI could sell such licences for free if this is required.

>> 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.

The first group will likely become smaller and smaller as time passes and cores become cheaper. And the second group can always get a licence.

>> 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.

Perhaps not, but the majority or at least some. It would still be better than a complete halt as dictated by the current process.

>>  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.

The actual comparison is the actual comparison when the project is started? Do we use VMS or do we use Linux? What does each cost?

What each costs over ten years won't matter if we don't even know yet if the project pans out or will be important. Once it is important, money is easily gotten.

>> (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.
> 

Yes.