Why would they bother? It's a dead platform and hobbyists aren't going to pay big bucks. All the VMS licenses you need are a couple of google searches away, anyway. It was "liberated" years ago.

I would have naively assumed that they didn't like being a dead platform, in which case getting some sort of hobbyist interest is a prudent move.

OP is asking about OpenVMS *on VAX*, 3 CPU architectures ago, which is definitely a dead platform

I think the logic applies for as long as they have customers using the platform. If there are paying customers on ancient hardware, or emulators thereof, then I would expect it to be in their interests to have a way to get new blood to support that.

There was a large VMS software shop in the area. They had moved from VAX to Alpha in the mid 90's. I remember some dude there, back in the mid 90's, showing me a 4 CPU system with a gigabyte of RAM. That was unheard of then. DEC did some amazing stuff. When Compaq acquired it, it was a sad day indeed. They made PC clones, while DEC had their own CPUs and operating systems.

After the Alpha was canceled, the local shop gave up on VMS, ported everything to Linux and IBM AIX, and moved on. Seems like a wise move.

VMS has been dying for decades. I suspect any serious business has ported their app to another platform.

I haven't done it myself, but from what I've heard it isn't hard to work around the licensing restrictions and run it anyway even without a hobbyist license.

I know a lot of people in the OpenVMS hobbyist community were dead set against people doing that, and I do understand why – one of the big reasons was they were worried that it might give the hobbyist community a bad name inside DEC/Compaq/HP(E), which in turn might lead to the hobbyist program being discontinued.

But, when it comes to OpenVMS on VAX – there is no alternative, I really doubt anyone who currently works for HPE cares one iota, and I'm not sure why VSI should be upset about it either? So maybe that former logic is no longer applicable.

Different story for Alpha and Itanium (and soon to be x86), for which there is a hobbyist program run by VSI, and the same concern (that hobbyists hacking license restrictions might upset the vendor to the point that they cancel the hobbyist program) applies to VSI as well.

(I suppose one possible reason VSI might get upset with breaking licensing restrictions on VAX, is that any technical workaround for VAX licensing might also work on newer platforms – but I don't know if that is actually true, and even if it were, VSI could easily make it false by moving to an incompatible licensing system for their OpenVMS releases.)

Why VAX over Alpha (a pure 64-bit RISC ISA)? Do you specifically have VAX boxes to use this on? Regardless, I wish the Deathrow Cluster project was still around (thanks to Da Beave for running it for years).

The SimH emulator has long been able to run OpenVMS VAX.

There are probably free Alpha emulators by now, but the VAX version has been running on PCs for a long, long time, and it's what people know.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

For open-source Alpha emulation, there is AXPbox, which is a fork of the somewhat ancient es40, with some new fixes. It even runs on m1 macs now.

DEC would have been profoundly wise if they had recognized and adopted ARM, porting VMS to it.

Maybe Cutler would have stayed in that early fait-accomplis. They also never would have spent the money on Alpha, or wasted time selling MIPS workstations.

One thing is that there is a much larger array of interesting old software for the VAX rather than Alpha. The same will be true for Alpa compared with x86, but at least it will be easier to run more modern software on x86.

(I own both VAX and Alpha hardware and run VMS on both)

> (I own both VAX and Alpha hardware and run VMS on both)

Lucky you!

You can get a community licence from VMS Software:

https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/

"Please note that in accordance with the license agreement between VMS Software Inc. and HPE, VMS Software Inc. are not able to distribute VAX licenses."

Is it because they can't distribute licenses for non-VSI versions of OpenVMS? Depending on their license agreement maybe VSI can do new VAX releases, but since OpenVMS VAX system still kicking are running at best a 20 years old release that's been out of support for a decade, even if that's the case they probably think it's not worth the hassle.

Yes I believe that is basically it, their deal with HPE says they can only issue licenses for OpenVMS on VAX if they create a VSI OpenVMS on VAX release, but it is commercially unviable for them to do so – there is no way there are a sufficient number of customers willing to pay a sufficient amount of $$$ to make it worthwhile. Very few people use OpenVMS on VAX in production any more. I think, if it survives anywhere, it would likely be in embedded / industrial control applications – some MicroVAX in a factory somewhere running an ancient VMS version, controlling some machinery – but why would someone want to pay to upgrade such a system to a newer VMS version? They'd get nothing out of it and it would risk breaking things.

Putting that aside, I think a VAX release is also technically much more challenging than Alpha/Itanium was. From what I've heard, the VAX release used different (older) build tools, etc, and even if HPE or VSI still has the source, it would be quite an effort to work out even how to compile it all. By contrast, HPE was still building new Alpha/Itanium versions internally at the time it started to transition to VSI, so it was just transitioning a currently active process to another organisation, as opposed to resurrecting something which hadn't been actively done in many years.

I would assume VAX licenses refers to the VAX not x86 version.