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

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <ihpdcdFkn8kU1 at mid.individual.net>, Bill Gunshannon
<bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> 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.  
> 
> The key here is "used to be".  Does anyone know of any academic use of
> VMS today?

Not many.  But most people here think that VSI should try to get new 
customers.  Academia might not bring in that much profit, but it trains 
a new generation who want to use VMS.  DEC's biggest mistake was losing 
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.

Right; that's why I think that basic payment on computing power is not a 
good idea.

> >> 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.
> 
> You mean like it did for the VAX?  Welcome to reality.

Right.  The whole discussion here is to try to avoid what happened to 
VAX, so a proposed solution which leads to a similar end result is a 
non-starter.

> The only true non-commercial use is hobbyists.  Non-profit,
> Government use, Academic use are all just as commercial as a
> bank, store or factory.

Depends on the definition, local laws, etc.