[Info-vax] vax vms licenses

[David Goodwin]

On Wednesday, April 27, 2022 at 7:11:54 AM UTC+12, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <3a643f5c-5df8-4743... at googlegroups.com>,
> David Goodwin <dgso... at gmail.com> writes: 
> 
> > But I don't see that happening. Too risky, too hard. And I suspect many 
> > OpenVMS users would rather see the platform go extinct than be 
> > open-sourced.
> If VMS were open source, it wouldn't work. Many point out the 
> differences between VMS and other operating systems. One of them is 
> that if open source works for some, it doesn't necessarily work for all. 
> 
> The main problem is the lack of perpetual licenses.

I don't see any sensible explanation for why having access to the source
code is a bad thing or why it couldn't work for OpenVMS. If you're worried about 
some hidden security vulnerability then those exist whether the source is public 
or not. Closed source for security reasons is nothing more than quite a bad 
implementation of security through obscurity.

Perpetual licenses only solve the problem in the short term. Regardless of what
VSI does the customers they have today will over time leave (out of business, 
whatever OpenVMS was doing is no longer needed, etc). VSI needs to win new 
customers to replace those that leave. Perpetual licenses alone won't encourage 
*anyone* to switch from Linux.

Closed source with perpetual licenses guarantees that one day it will no longer
be possible to buy new licenses. It guarantees that one day security updates
will no longer be available. It guarantees that one day when those hidden
security vulnerabilities are discovered no one will be legally allowed to fix them.