Hi and nice to meet you; I share your same exact feeling and that's what brought me here: Cisco programs and licenses have precisely this problem, while their old software would be great to teach networking students in schools the fundamentals and Cisco would even benefit from this, because more people hired by companies would be familiar with Cisco products...market logic is so stupid sometimes (often due to blind executives and dumb shareholders, despite great technical people).
Would you be up to having a talk about the kind of licensing I need help about and to help me submit requests here (which I don't seem to be able to in the requests section)?
Thank you very much!
Quote:
Originally Posted by lpt0
Hello
I'm a not so young developer with mostly experience in the UNIXes world. I'm looking forward to share the knowledge I have, and discuss software preservation with whomever might be interested.
By software preservation I mean the countless applications that literally vanished, evaporated from an entire era of computing. In most cases vendors went bankrupt, or were acquired, then acquired again, changed businesses. Even if you wanted a new key for your old Sparc Solaris license server for that critical piece of old obsolete software that is central to your business, no one now has the ability to generate them.
For most, getting the actual software itself is already a challenge. In most cases, impossible. Getting licenses, is a crazy proposition and leaves one to fend for himself. And what to do when you do find a way to get that crucial piece of software of vanished vendor X running on your OpenVMS server?
Someone somewhere might be interested in having a license too. Computer museums perhaps.
Anyway, now that the motivation was presented, you know a bit about me. I'm looking forward to having interesting discussions with you.
Best
L.
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