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

[Andrew Brehm]

On 02/06/2021 13:26, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> 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.

I think academic use for non-educational purposes qualifies as "commercial". It can certainly qualify for the requirement for a licence.

As for the big mistake, I made no such assumption.

>>> 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.

Not if hobbyists use small system. Also, hobbyist licences are up to VSI. They can grant licences for larger hobbyist systems.

>> 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.

VSI can grant licences for free.

The idea is that very small systems would be free while larger systems need a licence. Whether that licence would be free or not free depending on use is independent of the basic idea of having automatic free licences for very small systems.

>>>> 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".

Why not?

Many OS are licenced per core. VMware ESXi is, for example. They do define a number of cores as the limit up to which a certain licence works.

>> 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?
> 

I wasn't talking about products. I am seeing this from the perspective of in-house IT. A project can be anything, a new product, an old product continue, a new version of some software, a reconfiguration, a move to a new platform or new hardware.