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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/2/2021 7:20 AM, Andrew Brehm wrote:
> 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:
>>> 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.

Even in the Linux x86-64 market then production VM's with 4 cores
and 8 GB RAM are not that uncommon. The VM may reside on a physical box
with more resources, but that is a different story - *nobody* likes
licensing of SW running in VM based on the total physical specs.

And it is even worse with VMS. Most production VMS systems are very
old and when they were created 4 CPU 8 GB RAM was a high end system.
And they still run fine on that. It is probably like 80-90% of
production VMS system that couldd run on that.

Sure if the VMS world start changing the 40 year old applications
to newer technologies then resource demand will go up. But that may
turn out to be a very slow process.

>>> 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.

If the pricing is that 4 core 8 GB is free and more cost money, then
I think you can expect those that pay to have an actual need for
more.

And lack of resources may not just limit throughput - it may mean
won't run.

Arne