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

[Chris Townley]

On 03/04/2024 01:13, bill wrote:
> 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
> 

It isn't gone, but changed i the way it is administered, so I imagine 
the license stays the same, although I imagine they might update it in 
line with the changes

-- 
Chris