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

[bill]

On 4/2/2024 6:08 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> 
> 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/

What would be the purpose of reading that?  The Community License
Program is done.

bill