The Community License Program (CLP)
When we kicked off the CLP back in 2020, our idea was to replace the HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist program. As everyone knew HPE had pulled out of the OpenVMS market some years previously, and the Hobbyist program was heading to its inexorable end.
Our aims were modest in the early days, provide an alternative to the HPE program and let’s see if we can hit 500 members (more than the Hobbyist program at the time). Our first obstacle was to try and get existing Hobbyist members over to our program; we couldn't just take the HPE Hobbyist list (data protection) and transfer them, so we had to email blast as many people as we could, at the same time socializing our new program.
To our (slight) surprise the applications started to pour in, even though we were asking people to reregister their details. Great, we thought, lets see what happens after the first rush. What happened, is that the applications continued to arrive, yes they slowed down after that first month, but we still get around 10 a week, and amazingly its not just the old VMS folks who want to try it out. On one of our recent CLP calls (yes we have them), we calculated that over 20% of the applications were from people new to the environment.
From our original aims, I think I can say we have delivered a pretty good alternative to HPE's Hobbyist program, in fact one of our program members recently said, “This is probably the best, fastest and nicest community service I ever encountered from a proprietary product.”. On top of that, we smashed the 500 member goal and are now heading towards our first 1000 members.
So, a big thank you to all our CLP members (now and future) and of course congratulations to the VSI CLP team, they've worked really hard to make this program successful!
Director of Strategy for VMS Software, Inc.
