[Info-vax] Releasing VMS openly, was: Re: vax vms licenses

[David Goodwin]

On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 1:43:02 PM UTC+12, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> > HPE _can't_ release VAX/VMS openly, at least without investing in a 
> > lot of resources, money, and time to review the VMS codebase and 
> > any licence agreements with third parties that might have IP within 
> > VMS.
> This is certainly the case for later versions, certainly anything with 
> DECWindows in it. Lots of constraints there. 
> 
> I doubt it's the case for VMS 4.7 though, which was all in-house before 
> the Era of Obsessive Code Reuse. 
> --scott 

Would DECwindows be such a problem today? The basic X server has
always been open source and given DEC had a hand in designing and
building X11 it seems unlikely the would have licensed 3rd party bits
there.

Motif was licensed from The Open Group but they released it as open
source under the LGPL in 2012. Over on Alpha, CDE was also licensed from
The Open Group and it too was released under the LGPL in 2012. So
probably no issue with HPE or VSI releasing the code for this stuff.

Of course none of this is stopping HPE from just generating a single
non-expiring hobbyist license and emailing it to someone with a note
saying anyone is free to use and redistribute it under the terms of the
original hobbyist license. Code would be nice but really I'm more
interested in access to and preservation of the historic DEC releases 
of VMS.