26 Nov
2001
26 Nov
'01
6:21 a.m.
At 11:45 AM 11/26/01, Ethan Dicks wrote:
For those of us DECUS members who have not yet gotten
any hobbyist VAX
licenses, is it too late? I have one of the recent hobby CDs and a bunch
of 6.x originals, so media isn't a real problem, but licenses are.
Its still possible to get licenses if you have a DECUS *number.* The
original DECUS membership "ids" were a mix of letters (basically parts of
both your last and first name) and they were later changed to Encompass
membership numbers. If you have the number then the Montagar page will
accept it, if you have the old LETTER id then that page will not recognize it.
What about a project to hack LMF? There was a lot of
controversy a while
back about the "Screw LMF" T-Shirt at a Symposium with, IIRC, a 5.2 and
5.3 patch (details of exact versions fuzzy). Did DEC decide to lock stuff
down after 5.x or is it still possible to simply bypass checks in LMF.EXE
to always grant a license?
Well it has been demonstrated on this list that one can "reverse engineer"
the LMF algorithm and generate your own PAKs. Presumably that is an option,
although it becomes significantly more onerous than being "legit"
It just sucks to have something as cool as
non-commercial licenses granted
for free change to require a paid-memebership to an organization to get
them for free.
Yes, and I'm afraid HP/Compaq is intent on laying off the "cool" people who
agree with sentiment in preference for keeping the bean counters. Now a lot
of DECUS folks are there only for the licenses so perhaps they could spin
off just a license program.
In any case, I don't expect to _pay_ to join
Encompass. I
would think that losing a substantial quantity of members would cause them
to re-think their policies (including folding, since it _does_ cost to
run an organization, but normally, those costs are considered absorbable
because of the greater benefit to the bottom-line that such an organization
represents).
In times like these, one has to wonder if they would notice the loss.
--Chuck