License (was: Mentec)

On 5/9/07, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote: I happen to have a genine, registered license for VMS for an 11/725 I bought during a period of transition in DEC's licensing practices, so I can at least speak to that. Before some date (Feb, 1987?), if you bought a VAX from someone else, both parties completed a multi-part form to transfer the license from the old owner to the new owner. This did not include updates, maintenance, or anything except what was "on" the machine when it changed hands. DEC resellers used to keep file cabinets full of paperwork that had the seller's half filled out so that when the hardware sold, the new buyer completed their part and the license transferred (with the reseller acting as middleman, but not directly involved in the chain of custody). From all the activity back and forth, DEC knew how large the relicensing market was, and for a variety of reasons (direct revenue, encouraging buyers to look at new systems vs old, etc.), DEC halted the practice of license transfer. Stocks of machines plunged in intrinsic value since the licenses on them were worthless. I bought my 11/725 the month prior to the change in policy, so I got it for a steal (at the time) since the next month, its former sale price would be a small fraction of the cost of a new license ($10,000!). This ban on transfers lasted about a month. Obviously, someone was made to realize that requiring all used VAXen to have new licenses wouldn't turn into buckets of money pouring into DEC either in the form of new licenses or new hardware sales, and, most likely, would result in customers examining technology from other vendors, so the new policy was to continue to process the old paperwork the old way, but with a $250 fee attached to the process. The buyer typically paid the fee, so it had a minimal impact on the commercial used equipment market. The policy change did affect us where I worked at the time - since we used a 11/730 for production, even into the 1990s (small software dev box that could run a different version of the OS from our primary environment), the cheapest way for a number of years to keep that box alive was to buy deeply discounted machines, then strip them. "Nobody" wanted an 11/725 in the late 1980s, and they were somewhat cheap to ship, especially if you let th reseller reclaim the RC25 drive before selling it to you - The PSU and CPU boards were identical to the 11/730, so it was cheaper to buy an entire machine as a box of spares than it was to be offline for a couple of days, scrambling to get parts in and get the box working. The only impact to us, in the end, was that we didn't bother to pay to have the licenses transferred since we were going to gut the machine anyway. Formerly, we got a box of parts and a license we didn't use (but it was an asset with some potential value as a base for an upgrade); now, we just let the license evaporate. All that having been said, I have a memory that DEC did _not_ treat PDP-11 products in the same way. I _think_ PDP-11 OSes had non-transferrable licenses pretty much across the board, but RSTS/E might have been an exception. For non-commercial users (hobbyists), though, I remember the real issue was access to distribution kits. I was so happy when a friend loaned me his set of 2.BSD tapes because it was something to load on my PDP-11 other than the floppies and packs that came with it when it was chucked out (old versions of RT-11 and RSX-11 - too old to be interesting at the time). With the modern ability to toss around multi-hundred-megabyte files like we used to swap floppies, physical access to install media is much less of an issue than it once was. Licensing, however, is just as thorny, if not thornier due to commercial disinterest in products that old with no obvious revenue stream attached to them. -ethan