A VAX you don't see every day....

[Andrew Back]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-08-21 at 21:47 -0700, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
>> SIMH can't be used for VAX emulation in a non-Hobbyist setting
>> legally.
>
> That probably depends where you are.  A bone of contention with certain
> Linux distributions is their lack of MP3 support, which is left out
> simply because the US allows software patents and is a very litigious
> country.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if it was perfectly legal to use Simh outside
> the US in a commercial environment.  The licences may say otherwise, but
> not be legally valid.

Well it certainly used to be the case that when you bought a VAX it came 
with a base VMS license, on top of which you could add licenses for 
additional users (or 'unlimited' if you were rich) and layered products. 
And you could transfer any license but base from one machine to another on 
paying a few hundred quid to DEC. And if you bought a second hand machine 
by rights you had to pay the fees to transfer the licenses over into your 
name.

Of course if you had the PAKs from the previous owners you could still run 
VMS and your apps. But the license keys would be in their name and I can't 
see how this would be legal. Unless this practice was not legal in the UK 
all along and Digital just got away with it...

In any case simh has no base license and if you transfered one from a real 
microvax you'd be lying. I suspect with Charon SRI have got HP to issue 
base licenses to go with their soft-VAXen.

Andrew