[HECnet] HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist license program is closing

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2020-03-07 19:57, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On 3/7/20 1:55 PM, Johnny Billquist 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.
>>
>> The situation is murky. Yes, XX2247 "owns" most PDP-11 OS and software.
>> However, there are clauses in the contracts that give HP (HPE?) control
>> over things still... So at the moment, there is not much of anything
>> XX2247 can do.
> 
>    Oh really?  Wow.
> 
>    Presumably this is to protect the interests of organizations still
> running PDP-11s in production, but I'd have thought that they were
> essentially self-supporting at this point.  I only know of one
> personally (locally), and they are entirely self-supporting.

I don't know exactly what they might be protecting. This was part of the 
original contract between Mentec and DEC. It's just still in place, 
since noone have been able to change it.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol