On 11/28/2025 3:20 PM, David Goodwin via cctalk wrote:
On 29/11/2025 09:49, Doug McIntyre via cctalk wrote:
On Sat, Nov 29, 2025 at 07:26:38AM +1100, Doug Jackson via cctalk wrote:
And even HP is a farce of a company now - a sad sad shell compared to what
they were.
Who actually owns the software? Have we considered going to them and
asking? It worked for CP/M - which is now unencumbered.
I heard rumors of such an effort going on for HPE OpenVMS VAX but I don't know
what the progress is or if it's still ongoing.
It is owned by VMS Software Inc (VSI). (https://vmssoftware.com/)
No, VMS Software has a license from HPE, they do not own the copyrights to
OpenVMS.
It is highly unlikely that they will be willing to free old VAX versions of the
VMS software.
They apparently are doing well enough to be a viable company supporting
existing VMS installations.
They still even have Itanic & Alpha licenses available.
As well as Community Edition licenses, although those are only available on x86
now.
I'm not so sure VSI holds the copyright - I think that's still with HPE. VSI
just has the right to develop new releases and issue licenses for those alone.
This is correct. HPE still owns the copyright on OpenVMS (all versions except
x86_64 - I'm not sure how that is handled since only VSI wrote it). VSI has
all the sources for all versions - VAX/Alpha/Itanium from HPE. They are
allowed to publish updated versions of any platform version, but choose not to
for VAX because they don't see a viable business reason - i.e. they won't make
money off of it. Even doing the minimum to get a new VAX version would cost
more in expenses that they feel they can make back through sales.
Last I heard they're not allowed to issue licenses for any releases produced by
DEC/Compaq/HP which is why they're not selling VAX licenses - they'd have to
produce a new VSI-branded OpenVMS VAX release in order to do that and it likely
isn't worth the effort.
Exactly.
As for the VSI Community Edition - that effectively doesn't exist now. All
they're doing is what used to be called the Student Kit - a Virtual Machine
with some preinstalled licenses and software which expires one year after it
was issued. You don't get to choose what to install, or install anything extra.
Yes and no. You can install things if you have the kits. So mostly 3rd party
software. But if you were speaking of VSI supplied products (other than Open
Source), yes that is correct.
No updates, no separate license you can apply to your existing VM to keep it
going, just start over from scratch every year.
Technically, yes. While it probably violates the CLP (Community License
Program) Agreement, there is nothing that prevents you from starting up the new
CLP VM, exporting the license PAKs from it and putting them on your currently
running VM. The con to this is that they you miss the updates that were
applied since the previous year. At some point that might not be too bad, but
currently, with updates happening every month to compilers and other layered
product it's a pain.
The other thing you can do is keep the system disk as pristine as possible and
add a second virtual disk with everything that you want to keep going from year
to year - account homes, software repositories, etc. Then just moving that
disk over to the new one when needed. You lose any customizations of the
system disk, but you could write DCL programs to make those modifications so
they are transferable.
--
John H. Reinhardt
