What follows is an introduction to and additional details on the HP OpenVMS Hobbyist licensing program and the available licenses and installation media.

Membership

For OpenVMS users that are not already members of a recognized HP user group or another user organization associated with OpenVMS, the hobbyist license registration process can require as much as two weeks to complete. Per the OpenVMS Hobbyist web site, different user group chapters around the world will synchronize their respective membership databases at different times; the US membership database is generally provided and updated weekly, late in the week. Other chapters including the UK and Canada chapters can require as many as several weeks before the database update reaches the hobbyist web site. Intervals can further depend on the numbers of new members.

Please be patient.

The whole process operates at pre-Internet pre-distributed pre-computer speeds.

The whole process takes a week or two, and occasionally longer.

Once the membership numbers are propagated over to the hobbyist site, you can proceed with the hobbyist license registration process.

To start the process to register for the free OpenVMS hobbyist licenses, you must first be a member of a recognized OpenVMS-related user group. And you will need some patience here too, as well.

The OpenVMS hobbyist web site has a list of the user group organizations affiliated with and recognized by the hobbyist licensing program.

Various of the OpenVMS user groups and organizations offer a free membership level, including DECUServe. DECUServe offers free membership for all, is available world-wide, and registration uploads into the hobbyist database occur twice weekly.

The US Connect Community chapter does not offer free memberships.

Once you are a registered member of a recognized user group (whether at a free or at a paid level), you will want to allow at least a week for the update and for the membership information records to reach the OpenVMS Hobbyist web site; a week or two between when your membership is entered and before you request for the OpenVMS Hobbyist licenses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be distributed databases and instant connections. But we are talking free here, after all.

You'll need to enter your particular user group membership number or identifier as part of the hobbyist license registration process; as your DECUS number. (DECUS was the classic name of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) users' group.)

For the hobbyist licenses — and you will need to select two sets of license Product Authorization Keys (PAKs), one set for the base operating system for the particular VAX, Alpha or Itanium Integrity architecture hardware you have, and a set for the layered products — visit OpenVMS Hobbyist website. The two sets of license PAKs will be delivered by email messages. (If you should receive a blank mail message, try requesting the group of PAKs again; there is reportedly an occasional and rare and unresolved error when sending out the text of the PAKs in the registration mail message.)

Hobbyist Media Kits

The OpenVMS Hobbyist licensing program provides free non-commercial licenses for OpenVMS on all platforms via email, and provides a path to order low-cost CD distribution media for OpenVMS VAX and OpenVMS Alpha. The free non-commercial licenses and the hobbyist CD software distribution kits for OpenVMS VAX and OpenVMS Alpha are available from the OpenVMS Hobbyist web site.

There is presently no OpenVMS I64 Integrity Itanium Hobbyist DVD media kit available.

There are presently no HP-sanctioned operating system or layered product downloads (disk images or ISO images or whatever you want to call the construct) available. The available path here is to acquire a hobbyist media kit, or an official HP distribution.

Get the CD; Don't Try a Bootable Disk Image (Yet)

Once you have your membership and have registered for your licenses, low-cost (US$30, including international shipping) Hobbyist OpenVMS VAX and OpenVMS Alpha CD distribution kits containing the core operating system and layered product (LP) kits are also available from the hobbyist web site. That CD price includes international shipping.

There is presently no OpenVMS I64 Integrity Itanium Hobbyist DVD media kit available.

HoffmanLabs strongly encourages all new hobbyists acquire a standard OpenVMS distribution kit, or the US$30 hobbyist distribution. Once you have some experience with OpenVMS and once you have a functional OpenVMS system, then you can replicate the distribution kits. Then you can copy files around. Should you need to — and should your software licenses permit it. But until you have an initial and functional OpenVMS system installed and booted and a functional IP network is available, dealing with generating or recreating the disk volume structures and related and simply transferring files around can be — and often is — non-trivial.

Microsoft Windows PCs, Apple Mac OS X, Linux, Tru64 Unix, HP-UX, and other platforms do not have the ability to generate a bootable OpenVMS ODS-2 or ODS-5 disk volume environment using platform-native native tools. (But yes, you can clone disk image of a real OpenVMS CD or DVD distro, using dd or CDDVD/COPY or related tools. Replication assumes you can locate or can create your own bootable disk image, and HP does not traditionally offer these disk images for download. For details on creating bootable disk images for OpenVMS, see LabsNotes: Recording CD and DVD Media on OpenVMS, and the discussion of replicating an OpenVMS VAX distribution CD in the context of loading simh on Mac OS X..)

Information on the hardware and storage is available, as are additional introductory details on VAX, Alpha, Integrity Intel Itanium and emulation environments.

Parallel licensing programs for educational sites are also available.

There are several hardware articles that will be of interest to hobbyists, including:

• A Brief Introduction and History of OpenVMS
• OpenVMS Hardware Intro
• OpenVMS Hardware Intro: the VAX
• OpenVMS Hardware Intro: the Alpha
• OpenVMS Hardware Intro: the Integrity
• OpenVMS Hardware Intro: Hardware Emulation
• OpenVMS Licensing Intro; introducing LMF, a license PAK and why you need a set of architecture-specific base PAKs and a second set of Layered Product (LP) PAKs; that your hobbyist licenses are in two separately-requested and separately-issued pieces.
• OpenVMS Graphics Controllers
• Site-local Conventions, Product Names, Units

Revisions and Updates

Newest changes first.

• 27-Dec-2009 — minor rewording.
• 2-Dec-2009 — clarified the lack of OpenVMS I64 hobbyist media kits, and the lack of downloads.

18-Oct-2009 — added a link to DECUServe as a membership option.

• 18-Aug-2009 — No OpenVMS hobbyist license access at the free membership level in the US, based on information posted in the SIG: OpenVMS Forum over at the Connect Community site.
• 22-Jun-2009 — updated some wording, and added direct link to Connect Community Membership, with the URL acquired via Dale Coy. This link will almost certainly change.