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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, the irony that they call it OpenVMS now when you can only get an evaluation for comercial use and they explicitly bar hobbiests is a shame.

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Unless things have changed recently, hobbyists can sign up for a license for OpenVMS. However a condition of the license is that you can't use a hobbyist license for commercial purposes.

HPE has divested VMS Software Inc., so if you want hobbyist license you have to go to VSI and not to HPE. And under VSI the process of getting the hobyist license is simpler (ie. you don't have to be member of anything) and IIRC you can even get images of installation media directly from VSI.

Interesting, do you have a link?

I went via https://vmssoftware.com/ and the get Get OpenVMS link which yeilds a form that has:

"To help us qualify your application for this evaluation release kit, please fill out the following survey. Please be advised that community (hobbyist) licenses are not currently available, evaluation licenses are provided to commercial customers only."

https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/

Thank you - now just have to await for their "planned" x86 includion into this program. Sadly lost all my old unix server in a move decade ago :(

If you have windows you can use the "StudentKit"

https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2022/04/18/ready-to-run-o...

VSI does not have the rights to VMS on VAX, and so it's not included in their hobbyist license program.

Thank you for the information. Do you know if hobbyist licenses acquired before the divesture will still be honored?

Things changed.

Open has nothing todo with opensource but with "open" abi.

Same with OpenServer from SCO

True but then it was somewhat a fashion of the time to add Open to things (marketing trying to capitalise upon the Opensource movement heh). For VMS the history is:

"In July 1992, DEC renamed VAX/VMS to OpenVMS as an indication for its support of open systems industry standards such as POSIX and Unix compatibility, and to drop the VAX connection since a migration to a different architecture was underway."

It definitely was a fashion then to add "open" to names but this predates the wide use of the term "open source".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Open_source_as_a_t...

Likewise there is very few Open in POSIX and UNIX standards, for a long time, just like with ISO C and C++, one really needed to buy them in paper form to read them.

It's referring to the "Open Systems" hype of the 80s / early 90s. The term "open source" became popular only much later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)

What else are we going to congratulate them for, not requiring licensing to open a new TCP socket?

>congratulate

Why? Did you do that toward's SCO?

But later you found out about BSD's?

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