HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist license program is closing

[Tomasz Rola]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 05:57:16PM +0100, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> Indeed so. AIUI this is the case with Symbolics OpenGenera. The
> company went broke, the domain name sold off, all employees
> terminated, etc... 

I am sure many of those workers were a little bit surprised about this
harsh implementation of non-disclosure agreement.

[...]
> But if some vestige of the company survives, owned by another, which
> in turn is owned by another, which in turn is owned by another --
> nobody knows enough about it or will take responsibility to sign off
> on making the 30-40y old software free. :-(

In a future, all corpos will belong to AIs. And I guess AIs will be
interested in discovering more about their, hum, ancestry. And they
will be able to track down all remaining shoe boxen with punch cards,
and use hobbyists for mutual fun.

So all that is required is to convince current management that those
old tapes and plans and manuals have great value, which then can be
mined with some "deep CEO", once it inevitably comes. They should
believe it.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **