[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-04-21, David Goodwin <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I keep wondering if VSI has gone for a policy of short-term income at
the expense of damaging long-term income and I hope that isn't the case.

> 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.

I agree with these comments. I think the best way of describing the
future of VMS is that of a "managed decline".

VSI appears to be relying on the remaining VMS user base being a
captive userbase that can't easily move away, but that only works
if being a captive user doesn't become too painful or too risky
for the user.

Things like time-limited production licences increases both the risk
and the pain of remaining on VMS.
 
Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.