[Info-vax] Entitled attitudes, was: Re: vax vms licenses

[John E. Malmberg]

On 3/15/2021 7:39 AM, Oswald Knoppers wrote:
> 
> I am not familiar with this. Which PDP-11 OS licenses were scrapped?
> 
> I am running a PiDP11/70 with RSX11M-Plus.
> 
> These are the different OSes I have (from https://www3.ispnet.net/pidp11/systems.tar.gz):
> 
> pi at pidp11:/opt/pidp11 $ ls -l systems
> total 52
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 15 15:23 211bsd
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 25  2018 blinky
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 25  2018 dos11
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 22  2019 idled
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 25  2018 rsts7
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar  5 08:12 rsx11mplus
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 23  2019 rt11
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 13  2019 sysiii
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 26  2018 sysv
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 13  2019 unix5
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 13  2019 unix6
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 25  2018 unix7
> pi at pidp11:/opt/pidp11 $
> 
> Are any of the above illegal to run?

Any of them that you do not have a license that grants their use to you, 
and not otherwise allowed by the laws of your country.

As none of us know what licenses you hold, we can not say.

In the U.S. the process for handling a license violation just needs some 
level of proof by the plaintiff that a license has been infringed on in 
order to start some legal action.

Generally a public e-mail or newsgroup post is not good enough as there 
must be proof of the sender, at least according to US TV news reports of 
criminal proceedings.

World wide the SIAA can conduct that action on behalf of their members. 
  I have no idea if HPE or VSI are members.

https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Software_%26_Information_Industry_Association

The worst case of legal action is a raid to collect and preserve 
evidence, even if no evidence is found.

As such a raid removes all access to the computers from a company for 
analysis, it can be devastating for a business.

I have been required to attend classes by a former employer about this 
business risk, which is why that company and others are auditing all 
computers as much as they can looking for unlicensed software.

Generally as I understand the procedure, in most cases there will be a 
letter issued requesting a payment to make the use legal (Much higher 
than original purchase price), but not sure if that is required, and 
raids seemed to be reserved for sites that either ignore such letters, 
or are obviously violating the licensing intentionally.

If a system is connected to the public Internet in any way, it can phone 
home, and do so in ways that hard to block even if you know what to look 
for.  Most software that does this should tell you, but may not explain 
exactly how they are doing this.

I have had to remove software from sites that the employees thought were 
free to use in businesses, when they were only free to use at home, and 
I have found "phone home" reporting being done in such software.

And some of us can be dismissed by our employers if we even advocate 
violating copyright or other laws.

Regards,
-John