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

[MG]

On 25-Feb-2021 23:33, David Goodwin wrote:
> Its not a long term solution and its likely not an affordable solution for most
> people. Certainly I can't afford however many thousand US$ to buy a set
> of licenses approaching what the hobbyist program supplied. And that's
> assuming they even have that large a selection of licenses in stock.

The long-term solution is that OpenVMS will disappear and be forgotten,
which it already largely is.  VSI's efforts may or may not change that,
but that remains to be seen.

Many if not most individuals in the Usenet don't seem to mind and have
no problem with the whole, outdated, PAK licensing model.

The x86-64 port might not come in time to change any of that either and
if it continues to use the restrictive PAKs, with the relative hassle
involved (although VSI wisely reduced the number of PAKs, I've noticed),
then things won't look too good either way.

This Usenet group is full of an age demographic who started working in
a time when you could even buy a comfy house with a excrement-tier job.
Is it any wonder they don't see a problem with any of this?  So, really,
why bother.

Note, before anyone gets any funny ideas, I should point out that I
never violated any license agreement.  I'm simply arguing against this
outdated and restrictive system.  I will drop OpenVMS as a brick
whenever it's not available anymore, in full compliance.


> Ideally HPE would have just emailed a non-expiring license to everyone who
> had received a hobbyist license in the past before turning out the lights. 

You're "entitled", as they say around here...


> Whatever the motivation I am grateful the VSI program exists. I got my DS20
> out of storage specially for it (sadly I've got nothing smaller with an EV6 or newer).

For that reason I sold all my AXP and "I64" boat anchors and I
mostly use DECUServe instead.  Before I was a big fan of the
"Deathrow" cluster, but it sadly disappeared and it looks like
it's never coming back.  (Only the IRC channel still exists.)

  - MG