[HECnet] HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist license program is closing

[Thomas DeBellis]

Back before Digital was bought (perhaps by Compaq before HP swallowed 
them both), Bob Supnik posted a free, personal use, non-commercial 
license for the 36 bit line.  However, this had to be filled out and 
sent to Digital's Corporate Licensing Office. As this was in 1996, it's 
unclear who would be accepting delivery now...

However, there was some speculation about the licensing by some 
parties.  Tops-20 was developed directly from TENEX at DEC by some of 
the same employees who had developed TENEX at BBN.  However, this was 
done in part with ARPA funding and licensing for TENEX was far 
different.  Basically anybody could use it.  Certain KL replacement 
products (viz., FOONLY) used TENEX.

XKL (or Cisco) did pay Digital a certain amount of money for use of the 
TCP/IP implementation, but I don't know what rights XKL holds.  The code 
bases have diverged somewhat (TOAD Tops-20 supports a 30 bit virtual 
address space vs. the KL B's 23).

On 3/7/20 1:51 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On 3/7/20 1:45 PM, Ray Jewhurst wrote:
>> An interesting side question is this: what legacy DEC oses does HPE
>> still own the rights to and what if anything is going to happen to those?
>    I believe most (all?) of the PDP-11 OSs are, or at least were a few
> years ago, owned by David Carroll.  I don't know what he plans to do
> with it all, if anything.
>
>               -Dave
>