Some parts of the
HP 3000’s operating system modules are based on open source
projects — and one HP engineer suggested that makes that part of
MPE already open-sourced. Mark Bixby, who ported the Apache Web
server to the HP 3000 and manages Internet and interoperability
projects for HP, told customers in a 3000 newsgroup that perl
represents the face of OpenMPE.
“Still
waiting for OpenMPE?” Bixby asked. “You already have it for
these open source apps ported from Unix.” He went on to add that
moving such programs along to newer versions is homesteaders’
work, not HP’s.
“It’s
not that difficult to update these open source apps yourselves if
somebody else like me or Mark Klein or Lars Appel or whoever has
already done the hard part by performing the initial port,”
Bixby added. “Anybody who is going to be using these Unix open
source apps on MPE beyond 12/31/06 seriously needs to become
self-sufficient and develop the necessary porting skills to keep the
apps fresh if you have a need to stay on the leading
edge.”
Customers had
asked HP, when it solicited ideas for a possible 2005 Systems
Improvement Ballot, to update perl and make it a program that can be
run instead of compiled and then executed. Bixby noted that perl
5.8.1 is available on the HP Invent public access
development Web server, but perl has already moved forward to version
5.8.6.
“If I then
proceeded to port 5.8.6 on HP time, then what? Newer versions of the
source would still flow forth from perl.com, and you’d be back
where you are today with ‘old’ Perl binaries for MPE,”
Bixby said.
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