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End of OpenVMS Community License

D

davidrg

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In case you haven't seen/received the email:

Updates to the Community Program — VMS Software, Inc.

VMS Software, Inc. announces updates to its community license program: community licenses for x86 are provided as a vmdk package, Alpha and Integrity licenses are discontinued.
vmssoftware.com vmssoftware.com

The TL;DR:
  • No more Alpha or Itanium licenses. If you have licenses, they'll be renewed until March 2025 for Alpha and December 2025 for Itanium. If your application for licenses was pending, it has now been canceled.
  • No more x86 licenses or ISOs, instead if you can be bothered you'll get a vmdk with a preinstalled OpenVMS system that expires after a year. This seems to be the same as what the student kits were, just for x86. Every year you get to copy all your stuff to a fresh OpenVMS VM.
  • There will be an ambassador program "to enable collaboration between VMS Software and independent community members who wish to participate in the development of the OpenVMS ecosystem and bring value to VMS Software and are qualified to do so on the grounds of having extensive knowledge of and experience with OpenVMS and its layered products and/or knowledge of the OpenVMS market.". You get licenses, but you also have to "participate in the round table meetings" and "report on your work in the ecosystem".
 
I was under the impression most people left the formal hobbyist licensing program years ago in favor of just using pakgen. I guess they really want to wind down VMS.
 
Basically they don't want you to stay on Alpha/Itanium and should instead move to x64 and thus help them debug/prove out the x64 platform.

You get a VM that you can run, but you should probably get an NFS server and store all the stuff you care about somewhere else! Or some other way of having a disk exposed to the OS but not subject to the expired-license gimmick.

What I think they are missing is the redundancy/cloud/clustering portion of the market. Lots of newbie JavaScript programmers setting up the most ridiculous Rube Goldberg redundancy schemes; when you could possibly just cluster a few OpenVMS systems that are geographically diverse but running in the cloud, for far less investment.
 
Even if you store all your stuff on an NFS server or something, you've still got to reinstall and reconfigure everything on a yearly basis. I'm not going to bother - its not worth the effort. When my current x86 license expires that will be the end of x86 OpenVMS for me. I suspect I will not be alone in this.
 
NeXT said:
I was under the impression most people left the formal hobbyist licensing program years ago in favor of just using pakgen. I guess they really want to wind down VMS.
Click to expand...

All your PAKs are belong to us.

For sure, for hobby use on VAX or Alpha, at this point just gen your own.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice :))
 
NeXT said:
I was under the impression most people left the formal hobbyist licensing program years ago in favor of just using pakgen.
Click to expand...
Certainly I did as I’d little interest in VMS on Alpha or x86 and from the point that HP withdrew the writing was clear to see. I assume I’m far from alone.
 
Definitely a petulant undertone to the announcement. Best guess says they are beginning the outermost circle around the drain.
 
NeXT said:
I was under the impression most people left the formal hobbyist licensing program years ago in favor of just using pakgen. I guess they really want to wind down VMS.
Click to expand...
I think that whilst the DEC Hobbyist program existed, most ordered a licence. Now we have three options, buy a re-cycled licence, which is pure exploitation as most Vaxen in private hands would have had legitimate licences, run on an expired hobbyist licence on an old date or use PakGen. I suppose four install a BSD that supports the hardware but I feel that's pointless.....
 
Now DEC / VMS is just like most other vintage computers where the original company is long gone or no longer supporting the product.... When you want to play with Windows 1.0 you need to be creative in most cases, too....
 
spiceminer said:
... When you want to play with Windows 1.0 you need to be creative in most cases, too....
Click to expand...

I think you have to be creative even with Windows 10 to prevent it from trying to upgrade you to an unusable machine.
I am slowly switching all my PCs away from Windows 7 and 10 to Linux and will only keep one Windows 7 machine for legacy tools like EPROM/GAL programmers etc.
 
what a joke, "if you aren't willing to write code and documentation for us for free then fuck off, otherwise join the ambassador program so we can exploit your passion for free labor"
 
Someone said that FreeVMS "only covers 10% of OpenVMS". What is missing, Userland? Drivers? something else?
 
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