[Info-vax] New VSI Community License Program for x86

[Craig A. Berry]

On 4/2/24 2:53 PM, bill wrote:
> On 4/2/2024 9:16 AM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
>>
>> On 4/2/24 7:22 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> On 2024-04-01, John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> 
>>> wrote:
>>
>>>> I have also done a LICENSE /ISSUE/PROCEDURE and copied the supplied 
>>>> licenses to my previous OpenVMS x86 systems
>>>>
>>>
>>> Until someone in VSI gets into a "you are not allowed to do that 
>>> !!!!!!!!"
>>> frame of mind and says it is against the terms of the Community 
>>> Licence. :-)
>>
>> I would ask them to show me where in the terms it says that.  IANAL, but
>> the terms describe "use" of the license and don't say anything about how
>> you get the license onto the system.  It seems the vmdk thing is
>> intended to be a way to get newbies up and running quicker, and it may
>> very well be good for that.  As far as I can tell the delivery mechanism
>> is completely orthogonal to the terms of the license.
>>
> 
> 
> As far back as I can remember (which goes all the way back
> to DEC)  No license was freely transferable.

Of course for commercial licenses you can't simply double your fun by
putting the same license on two systems because it's a pay-per-use
scenario, but no hobbyist nor community license has ever had that
restriction. Non-transferable in the community license agreement pretty
obviously means you can't give your license to someone else; it has
nothing to do with how many systems you can run that license on.  You
are restricted to running on "servers, and/or emulators and/or
hypervisors"; the "and" part of "and/or" and the plural nouns clearly
set the expectation that you can be running more than one system.  It
wouldn't make a lot of sense for them to provide licenses for clustering
if you were only allowed to run a single system!

Sure, they could change the agreement or cancel the program entirely or
simply stop providing licenses, as they will be doing for Alpha and
Itanium, but what the agreement in effect today actually says does matter.

>   I am not about
> to go and read the license now (TL:DR) but I am sure it's still
> in there somewhere.

That's a pity since becoming less ignorant is pretty easy to do:

https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/agreement/