[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[David Goodwin]

On Wednesday, April 20, 2022 at 9:01:27 AM UTC+12, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:
> On Tue, 2022-04-19 at 18:05 +0000, Simon Clubley wrote: 
> > IOW, with these time-limited production licences, if VSI goes bust, 
> > then those licences will eventually stop working and hence so will 
> > the customer systems those licences are installed on.
> That's particularly worrying and that's something VSI needs to be aware 
> of *OR* VMS will go the way of dinosaurs for good. 

Yeah, this is kind of insane.

VSIs biggest competitor does everything VMS can do, has overwhelming 
network effects working in its favor *and* its free *and* its open-source. 
And if all of that wasn't enough to encourage people to move off of VMS,
VSI has gone and made buying VMS more difficult and licensing more
onerous too.

As a proprietary niche operating system VMS likely has no long-term future.
No one is going to migrate from Linux to an expensive proprietary
operating system that could just stop working one day only to run out of
date 3rd party ports of software they already had on Linux. Existing customers 
will slowly leave while no new customers will arrive to replace them. Eventually 
it will no longer be possible to buy licenses and the source code will be lost 
or deleted.