I wonder, if you get from VSI an Alpha or Itanium license file for OpenVMS, would OpenVMS for VAX accept the same license file?
People long ago cracked the license key generation for OpenVMS. (Plus, there are various leaked license files floating around, including non-expiring perpetual licenses.) The OpenVMS hobbyist community has always opposed doing that – there is no reason to do that when there is a legal method to run OpenVMS, and there was a concern it would damage relations with HPE thereby threatening the future of the hobbyist program. But, if there stops being any legal way to run OpenVMS on VAX, I wonder if the community attitude would change on that topic?
They wont because the PRODUCER value is wrong in the VSI licenses. But you are correct, that for most uses outside of commercial museum systems, its probably not much of an issue since there are license generators out there in the wild.
It is really unfortunate, that a community which has always been highly adverse to software piracy, would be forced into such a situation by HPE to maintain their hobby systems though. At this stage, VAX VMS being out of support for so many years, and having such little commercial value even under emulation, it just seems silly HPE does not issue a perpetual non-comerical license for VAX systems.