January 2004

OpenMPE director agitates for HP action

Open letter asks HP to free MPE; HP responds with “continue to work” statement

An OpenMPE board member has published a letter urging HP to “free MPE” or face a boycott of its products by customers. HP issued a reply to that Ken Sletten letter — a statement from HP’s 3000 business manager Dave Wilde saying the vendor is still working on helping its customers who must remain on the platform.

Sletten posted his 10-page letter on two Internet mailing lists December 21, just as HP was closing its doors for a holiday hiatus that extended through January 2 for many of its executives. But in an exclusive interview, Wilde said he and others in HP remain committed to working on post-2006 solutions for customers who must use the 3000 and MPE/iX beyond HP’s support. Both statements are on the NewsWire’s Web site.

Sletten’s letter showed the first peek at negotiations between HP’s 3000 officials and the OpenMPE board. His communiqué illustrated frustration with the pace of the talks between OpenMPE and HP. Some customers hope OpenMPE’s efforts will lead to new ownership of the MPE/iX source code.

“The patience of this member of the board has been well and thoroughly exhausted,” Sletten’s letter stated. “Progress on life for MPE after HP is effectively at all stop.” Frustrated with a lack of HP commitment to making the 3000’s operating system available to the Open-MPE lab efforts, Sletten said he believes HP is years behind schedule.

HP needs to make a commitment now to freeing MPE, before HP support ends in 2006, he said. OpenMPE’s lab efforts must replace HP’s build and release cycle for MPE/iX, he explained, a lengthy job.

“The in-depth collective knowledge required to reliably accomplish those tasks cannot successfully be carried forward if HP waits until just before they turn out the lights to set MPE free,” Sletten’s letter stated.

An e-mail from HP to the OpenMPE board was included in Sletten’s letter. The HP e-mail said the vendor will communicate a schedule for releasing information by the end of this month. But Sletten said HP didn’t even want that deadline communicated to the customer base.

“We don’t want to prematurely commit ourselves to a path that limits our ability to meet the varied, and sometimes conflicting, needs of our customers and partners,” said the HP letter signed by Mike Paivinen. “As a result, we expect to be able to provide a communication timeline to the OpenMPE Board by January 31, 2004.”

Sletten stressed that his view was a minority opinion on the board. Vice-chairman Birket Foster of MPE software provider MB Foster said he believed that “This rant is premature. There are too many issues involved for a quick decision. I think we should give HP the time.”

OpenMPE board chair Jon Backus resigned his membership on the board on Dec. 31 for reasons unrelated to Sletten’s letter. Backus took a job for Volvo’s IT department and closed TechGroup, his firm that supported 3000 customers and OpenMPE. “As a result, I no longer qualify to be a member of the OpenMPE board,” Backus reported to the group’s list. “I will continue to watch from a distance.”

HP’s Dave Wilde released a statement that detailed the steps HP has taken to help homesteading customers since talks with OpenMPE began:

• Announced plans to help users interested in self-support by maintaining documentation, tools, patches, and other e3000 content online, including Jazz and ITRC content. HP will also unlock the passwords on 3000-unique diagnostics.

• In February 2002, “HP announced general terms for a low-cost MPE/iX license for use on emulator-based systems.”

• HP is “Looking at ways to enhance MPE/iX to make peripheral use easier after end-of-support, including support for larger disk and a general ‘driver-hardening’ effort for more flexible connectivity.”

The statement also said HP is continuing the software license transfer process for used e3000 sales past end-of-support and will provide for MPE/iX release tape distribution after end-of-support.

These items fall short of what Sletten and some others in the community want from the vendor: a way to take control of the future of MPE/iX now that HP has stopped selling HP 3000s.

Tim O’Neill at the US Army’s Aberdeen Test Center, where 3000s have worked since 1978, said he wants HP to enable a future that would let companies continue to use MPE/iX.

“The ideal would be an existing company buying the MPE lab and its people,” O’Neill said. “If nothing else, HP would be relieved of the support burden.”

Though Sletten’s letter was a minority position, the OpenMPE board asked HP in November to release an “Agreement in Principle.” This AIP would show the community that HP intends to grant OpenMPE rights to give MPE/iX a life beyond HP.

Foster signed a letter to HP on behalf of the OpenMPE board, one which Sletten quoted, asking HP to issue the AIP by Dec. 12. The AIP would state that HP intends to grant OpenMPE “a non-exclusive license to all source code for MPE/iX and related MPE products, tools, software build/test suites and internal documentation,” Foster’s letter said. “This license will allow OpenMPE to produce, control, manage and distribute bug fixes and enhancements to these products, and thereby facilitate future support of MPE for sites that continue to run it beyond 2006.”

HP’s reply to Foster’s letter agreed to a Jan. 31 deadline when the vendor will communicate a schedule to OpenMPE for releasing information. The reply led Sletten to conclude “It doesn’t look like HP will get around to taking substantive steps to release their death-grip on MPE until after it has ceased to matter.”

HP’s Wilde said in his statement to the NewsWire that “While we acknowledge the customer needs that will extend beyond 2006, it has never been our intention, nor do we have any plans, to encourage the use of the HP e3000 after HP end-of-support. However, we absolutely intend to continue working directly with our valued customers, partners, Interex and the OpenMPE Board of Directors — including work on advocacy requests regarding long-term availability of hardware and access to MPE/iX source code — to determine how to best help address the varied concerns of the overall e3000 community in the months and years to come.”