It is a commercial product and it is their goodwill to offer licenses for free. They don't have to do it at all, Mr. Entitled.
One thing they could do is to offer it in cloud instances. Let more people play with it, see its strengths compared to Linux, and let it win share on its merits.
The optics of this aren't great - it looks like they aren't fond on people learning its characteristics.
VMS has been dead for decades. If they want to attract new users they should make better choices
Them, like ArcaOS and OS 2200 are living in some wild fantasy land. There's, at least in theory, ways to revitalize these products but it's not going to happen by digging larger moats
More people are probably still using CP/M then all of those put together
Bull released a MCP VM demo development kit, I tried really hard to set it up and write some simple ALGOL for it.
If anything it thought me to appreciate how MULTICS/UNIX (and aside the pdp10 world) gave us line oriented developer-focused interactive environments that don't make ones eyes bleed.
Somehow this seems like one of those idea's that many legacy-niche-OS developers imagine themselves in, it's old, uses little memory (and does little) so now it must be feasible as a embedded-OS, AmigaOS-oid developers imagined the same in the early 00's...
However about total amount of users I don't fully agree, there's significant deployments of VMS still around in the infrastructure and finance sectors. Although some very high profile customers have migrated away on to Linux using compatibility layers.
And within that subset there's customers that still have high performance requirements making them willing to invest in VMS on new hardware.
If you ran VMS on a GS1280 (64 Alpha CPU's, split into 2 32CPU partitions), then migrated to several generations of SuperDome's (Itanium) and your work-load is still scaling with your wider company demand, bare metal deployments on latest x86 hardware of VMS can perfectly make sense.