[Info-vax] VMS VAX License for personal Microvax 3100 Model 40

[David Goodwin]

On Friday, July 29, 2022 at 9:04:40 AM UTC+12, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <tbp8s9$23mh7$1... at dont-email.me>, 
> Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote: 
> >On 2022-07-26, Dan Cross <cr... at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote: 
> >> 
> >> But again, why should VSI care? They have nothing to do 
> >> with VAX. If people started doing this for Alpha, Itanium 
> >> or x86, I could see it since VSI has interest in those 
> >> platforms. But VAX is explicitly out of their domain. 
> >> 
> > 
> >Because how people behave in one area can be used as a proxy for 
> >how they might behave in other related areas in the future, especially 
> >when free stuff combined with a sense of entitlement is involved. 
> 
> Right. So we should go and find everyone who's using 
> a pirated copy of MS-DOS, or MacOS 7, or some variant 
> of Unix, or, well, all software, because then that'll 
> prove to VSI that we're responsible enough to merit a 
> hobbyist program. After all, what someone does in one 
> area can be used as a proxy for how they may behave 
> in a related area in the future, and "operating systems" 
> are clearly a related area. 
> 
> That seems more than a little obtuse. 
> 
> I imagine that if VSI cared what happened to VAX/VMS, 
> they'd have licensed the rights to VAX/VMS. 

IIRC its already been said here before that VSI not only has the right to 
issue new VSI-branded releases of OpenVMS VAX, they even have the 
necessary source code to do so. Problem is unlike for Alpha or Itanium 
there is apparently no (or not enough) money to make doing so worthwhile.

Perhaps some arrangement could be made though - maybe someone 
within VSI with a collection of vintage VAXen could volunteer to produce 
a VSI branded release of OpenVMS VAX 7.3 in their spare time to be made 
available for non-commercial use - perhaps for free, or perhaps sold for 
some affordable price (like the Tru64 hobbyist licenses were).

It wouldn't solve the problem of the *history* of OpenVMS being thrown 
in the trash bin by HPE (something I think is utterly deplorable) but it would 
at least allow people with VAXen to run the operating system it was 
designed to run. Plus it might be a worthwhile marketing foot in the door. 
People who otherwise would have never paid attention to OpenVMS might
decide to give the x86 version a go after running it on their VAX.

And maybe VSI will some day buy out VMS completely and make historic 
releases available in some form rather than letting the few remaining valid
permanent licenses slowly vanish as companies throw them out or
hobbyists (who bought new or had them transferred) die without transferring
them on to someone else.