HP’s lead engineer on the post-2003 support issues Mike Paivinen issued a communique to readers of the 3000-L mailing list, telling them that the vendor had a lot to handle since November’s announcement of ending HP 3000 support — so that’s why no more has been done on homesteading issues. His message to customers reported that ”Since our announcement in November, we have had to balance our time between meeting the ongoing needs of our customer base who are running their businesses on the e3000; strengthening the tools, training, and partnerships we have put in place to support the migration of the customer base off of the e3000,; responding to the issues and concerns raised by the e3000 customer base since the November 2001 announcement; delivering the 7.5 release on schedule, and dealing with the consequences of the HP-Compaq merger.”

Paivinen said that “Given the multiple needs of our customer base, we decided to focus on HP World 2002 for responding to the issues customers have raised about the periods after HP’s end-of-sales and end-of-support dates. By doing so, it gives us the opportunity to communicate a more cohesive message around those issues that wouldn’t have been possible earlier in the year. Waiting until HP World has also helped us to make more decisions, and in some cases better ones, I believe. Even so, we won’t make final decisions on some issues until a point in the future, beyond HP World, when we have more complete information.”

For many customers, the only issue that matters is the licensing of MPE to be used on an emulator that mimics HP 3000s running on Intel hardware. Rumors continued to abound at press time that HP is proposing the destruction of a licensed HP 3000 for every MPE license for an emulator that a customer wanted to deploy. The 3000’s longest advocates were howling over that possibility. “It’s clear that HP’s intention is to limit the MPE user community to the number of licenses at the time of its death,” said Wirt Atmar of AICS Research, “thereafter drawing the population constantly downwards over the years. This is completely opposite to the future that I believe is possible, where MPE would be distributed world-wide, at prices comparable to Linux distributions.”

HP’s plans might be a little clearer after the conference, if Paivinen’s message is a guide. The HP engineer said that he and fellow-engineer and OpenMPE board member Jeff Vance “plan to provide more detailed information at follow-up meetings like SIG-MPE and the OpenMPE session, if their agendas permit. Dave [Wilde], Jeff, or I will also be available throughout the show for follow-up discussions.” The SIG MPE meeting is set for noon on Thursday, and the OpenMPE meeting is at 4 PM Wednesday.