[Info-vax] VSI OpenVMS Community License

[Dan Cross]

In article <utvdak$2bpcm$1 at dont-email.me>,
Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>[snip]
>Well, if it was/is that much work, then should that not indicate that there has 
>been plenty of interest?

One would think!

>And if so, why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?

I hate to be that guy, but...but it must be asked: were the eggs
laid by that goose really all that golden?  Were they seeing any
return on it?  My guess is, "no, not really."

>Or, if there is such interest, perhaps some beancounter (everyone knows I 
>dislike beancounters, right?) sees it as a way to milk some money from the interest?
>
>The community license seemed like someone understood.  What happened to that 
>understanding?

It's been said before in this newsgroup, by me and others, that
the current approach is non-competitive.  It may be the only
possible approach for business and legal reasons, but the idea
of generating expanded sales around a closed-source, obscure
commercial system was always exceedingly unlikely.  Serving only
the legacy market is, by definition, finite.

And I say that as someone who actually really likes VMS and
would like to see it remain available!  I dislike software
monocultures on a number of grounds, but the reality is that
we're heading towards one.  It's a real shame.

Personally, I think the way to address this would have been to
simply do away with PAKs and time-limited licenses entirely.

The idea that commercial users would expose themselves legally
and operationally by using licenses that come out of pakgen or
whatever never struck me as particularly evidence-based; maybe
back in the day when small ma' and pa' operations were buying
a microvax and putting it in the back office to run bookkeeping,
but those days are long gone.  Legacy customers in the fortune
$n$-whatever are going to maintain their licenses because the
risk cost of not doing so outweighs the cost of staying on the
up-and-up.  So what's the point of all the overhead at the OS
level?

	- Dan C.