HP-UX for personal use?

[savery]

Is it possible to get an HP-UX license for personal use? Commercial UNIXes are a bit of a mystery to me and I'd like to try it out.

[dedmonst]

Short answer? No. There is no formal hobbyist/home use programme. Of course it's not too hard to find CDs/DVDs of various versions of HP-UX on ebay, and even rips of ISOs on some of the darker corners of the web. This is all questionably legal, but given that HPE doesn't really sell HP-UX systems any more and is now only about 4 years from ending support for HP-UX overall, I doubt anyone would come after you if you were really doing it just to try out. There are a small number of hobbyists and retro computing fans out there who run copies.

And of course HP-UX requires either a system with a PA-RISC or Itanium CPU to run - you can't easily run it on your x86 PC. A HP9000 (PA-RISC) or HP Integrity (Itanium) system can also be picked up on eBay, usually for a few hundred dollars if you are really interested in doing it.

It is just about possible to get older versions of HP-UX (such as 10.20 and 11.11) running under the QEMU PA-RISC emulator on an x86 system. I did this about 4 years ago on a Windows PC. It was a bit of a pain to setup, and was *painfully* slow, but it would boot HP-UX emulated on x86. Again you will need CDs/DVDs or ISOs of the Operating System though.

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] Commercial UNIXes are a bit of a mystery to me and I'd like to
> try it out.

   I've never seen a free/cheap HP-UX license/kit, but you can run the
OS if you have appropriate hardware, and can find an installation kit.
The bundled C compiler is not good for much (especially on PA-RISC), but
GCC should be available.

   Years ago, a non-commercial Tru64 UNIX bundle was available for $99,
but that's long gone.

   Oracle seems to offer Solaris "for free/open source developers and
non-production personal use."

      https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/announcing-the-first-oracle-solaris-114-cbe

   If you find anything for AIX, please let me know.

   It's not UNIX, but there's also VMS (on x86_64):

      https://vmssoftware.com/community/community-license/

[georgek_1]

Hello Steven,

There is no personal license for HP-UX . 

Supported version is HP-UX 11.31, and the license is commercial one .

I work for HPE/ I am an HPE Employee (HPE Community)

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] the license is commercial one .

Which costs what, approximately?  (Nearest power of ten?)

[dedmonst]

It's over a year since I left HPE, but I seem to recall a license to use the Base Operating Environment HP-UX 11iv3 system was somewhere between $1,000-$2,000 per socket at list price. You could add another zero if you wanted the more advanced Virtual Server Operating Environment, High Availability Operating Environment or Data Center Operating Environment.

I guess there are lower-cost hobbies! I'll stick to my point about whether HPE would ever come after a hobbyist anyway—although to be clear, officially, it is not legal to use without the license.