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OpenVMS licenses

Published EN

Introduction

 

In this text I am going to describe the steps needed to obtain the licenses that HP gives to those of us whose hobby is using this operating system. The license is free and is valid for a period of one year. Once the year has passed, you just have to go to the corresponding website and request the licenses, and at that moment you will be granted a new license for another year.

The steps to obtain the licenses are:

  • Become a member of DECUS/ENCOMPASS.
  • Request the licenses with your DECUS member number.
  • Request the CD of the chosen Operating System.

 

Joining ENCOMPASS

This step is required, since they give us a member number which is the one we then use to register the licenses. There are two kinds of membership (encompas member and encompass associate), one that costs money and one that is free. Most likely we are interested in the free one,  so we register at this URL:

 

https://www.encompassus.org/secure/membApp/index.cfm?form_type=ASSOC

 

 Once we register, they will send the member number to our email account. This can take up to two weeks, so you need to have some patience. Obviously, we cannot lose the number, since it is the one we will use to renew the licenses later on.

 

Requesting licenses

 

When we already  have our member number, we go to the Montagar website (OpenVMS hobbyist) and register our hobbyist license:

http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/register_license.html

 

 Once we have registered our member number, we can already request the hobbyist licenses. To do that we go to this URL and request whatever interests us:

 

http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/licenses.php

 

In principle, we are going to need:

  • A Base license for the system we are going to use, which can be VAX, Alpha or Itanium.
  • A license for the PAKs (associated products). If we use VAX or Alpha,
    we have one option, or a different one if it is for Itanium. When we
    are registering them, we need the serial number of the machine where
    we are going to run it. This serial number is normally on a sticker on
    the back of the machine, but if what we are going to
    use is an emulator, we put  ‘NONE‘ as the serial number.

 

Note: Do not lose these licenses; if you lose them and request them again in less than a year, they do NOT send them to you, they only send them to you when you are approaching the year since the previous issue.

 

Requesting the CD

 

Well, once we already have the licenses, we can request the CD with the Operating System we want. This is optional, since we may already have it or a friend may even have passed it on to us. Given that the installation is done by license, exchanging the CDs with the operating system is not considered piracy, not even those of the associated products. Anyway, I think it is interesting to have the original CDs. The URL to request them is :

 

http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/mount.html

 

And at the moment the OpenVMS Alpha Hobbyist Kit v4.0 is available as well as the OpenVMS VAX Hobbyist Kit v3.0. The cost of these kits is 30 dollars each, so (taking the exchange rate into account) we are not going to ruin ourselves too much.