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

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <ihp7s1Fjmf6U1 at mid.individual.net>, Andrew Brehm
<andrew at netneurotic.net> writes: 


> > 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.

> 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. 

No, it is not commercial.  (It is not hobbyist use, at least in most 
cases, but definitely not commercial.)  DEC and VMS used to be big in 
the academic market.  It is a big mistake to think that there are only 
hobbyists and huge commercial users.  In-between there are academic 
users, non-profit-organization users, small businesses, self-employed 
people, etc.

> > 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

So with that the possibility of running VMS for free, e.g. for 
hobbyists, vanishes as well.

> and cores become cheaper. And the second group can always get a licence.

Sure, but the whole point is that non-commercial customers shouldn't 
have to 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.
> > 
> > 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. 

You can't define a production system as "more powerful than X" then, 
when the license no longer works, limit the functionality to "less 
powerful than X".

> 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? 

For new products.  What about moving to a different platform?