VSI (the new owners of VMS) have created a new Hobbyist program. It is intended to run inside a emulator, but I imagine with some creativity it could be deployed onto real hardware.
The big downsides are:
A) You have to reinstall/recreate the emulator image when it expires - they don't hand out new keys.
B) No images for VAX (probably the most popular platform for emulation due to SIMH)
Seriously though - looking at VSI pages it looks like basically the VMS systems team greybeards spun off into a company.
If they want to see their whole life's work survive instead of fading into increasing irrelevance, they should just open source it under a 'freemium' model. With a bit of polish/tlc and focus on that area + maybe linux container emulation support to ease compatibility issues, it would make a pretty amazing basis for a 'cloud native' and 'iot' OS in addition to the ways that it's currently used.
The big downsides are: A) You have to reinstall/recreate the emulator image when it expires - they don't hand out new keys. B) No images for VAX (probably the most popular platform for emulation due to SIMH)