Who's to mind the CALENDAR?

Last year we took note of the HPCALENDAR intrinsic and its ability to create accurate timestamps for decades to come on the HP 3000. The intrinsic isn't new, though, even though HP advised its customers in November to begin using it on HP 3000s.

No, HPCALENDAR harks back to version 5.5 of MPE/iX. Its power lies in the 3000 for use by programmers who want accurate dates beyond 2038 for application files. But the operating system itself? It continues to use the old CALENDAR intrinsic, which only gives an accurate timestamp to 2027.

Is it foolish to be considering the timestamping ability of a 3000 some 19 years into the future? HP must have thought so while it made technical decisions for this system over the past seven years, knowing the vendor would step out of the 3000 community. You see, HPCALENDAR was never integrated into the operating system itself.

Now, with the 3000's development labs closed down, the community can wonder who'll keep the calendar functions up to date for MPE/iX.

Vesoft's Vladimir Volokh called to update us on the CALENDAR mistake, based on an error we made in our November printed issue. Although I carefully reproduced all of the HP technical details about using HPCALENDAR, a "display quote" on the page didn't get the facts correct"

The newer intrinsic extends the 3000's date accuracy for more than 30 years beyond 2008. 2038 will be the last year to accurately store timestamps.

Actually, it's Unix that's going to lose the ability to store timestamps accurately by 2038. Volokh explained that since HPCALENDAR uses 23 bits to store timestamps, there are 8.3 million places to store a date. If only HPCALENDAR had been wired into MPE/iX, instead of just available for application programmers to use as an intrinsic.

Top 2008 Stories: News Outta HP

The company which created the HP 3000 spent many months of 2008 quiet about the product and the 3000 community, until the final quarter of the year. As the deadline for ending HP 3000 lab operations approached, HP opened up opportunities and signaled its shutdowns of 3000 information and expertise. Nothing new will be available before the end of 2010, to the regret of OpenMPE and independent technical 3000 experts.

At the same time, more options showed up to motivate migrations, mostly in the form of new functionality Hewlett-Packard will never bring to its 3000 creations. Connectivity and efficient hardware design led the announcements.

1. HP said it will start negotiations for read-only reference licenses of the MPE/iX source code. The process will be conducted under confidential disclosure so the community won't be able to judge the HP offerings to the top technical experts. The value of source code to the community will be limited to creating workarounds and crafting object-level patches, and only for the community's companies with enough expertise to understand the code. However, new versions of MPE/iX won't be possible under the proposed source license.

2. Key technical information is being withheld in the form of locked-up configuration tools and technical manuals, all of which will remain inside HP even after its 3000 support operations end in two years' time.

3. Beta-test patches are staying inside of HP's support group for at least another two years, giving the general 3000 population no access to test completed 3000 enhancements and fixes. Only support customers will be able to use these patches, or test them, even while there's no development lab to modify any of the patches based on testing reports. But many other patches got their freedom throughout the year.

4. HP closed out its 3000 information presentations at the annual HP user conference with a farewell address at the HP Technology Forum in June. A pair of third parties, MB Foster and Speedware, continued to offer migration advice at the conference, but HP made it clear that it was time to thank the customers still using HP 3000s and move away from Tech Forum 3000 briefings.

5. HP acquired EDS, taking on a group of service and consulting experts as large as Hewlett-Packard itself in a move to make the vendor service-centric. The largest acquisition since HP swallowed Compaq, the deal will re-shape the vendor into a services powerhouse which will have to pare back slow-growing computer operations to keep high-salaried experts in the stable. The vendor announced a 25,000-employee layoff within weeks of finalizing the deal. Feeding the growth needs of EDS will push HP to evaluate products such as HP-UX which are showing minimal growth — if the vendor follows the same standards that pushed HP 3000s to the curb in 2001.

6. HP Support took on the remaining 3000 operations during the year, briefing customers but offering no clue on how much contact the community might expect from support. HP's community liaison to the 3000, business manager and lab experts depart this week. These final 12 months of 2008 included many with no information whatsoever from the vendor, which didn't appear eager to address much but the migration nuances still available to companies leaving the platform.

We're taking the New Year's break off to celebrate the start of the 15th year of 3000 NewsWire fun and independence. We'll be back with a look at what to expect during 2009 with our story of January 5. Have a great R&R break.

What the Community Is Doing Now

In less than one day from this morning, much of the world will close up its commercial concerns for a little while. Hanukkah is already upon us, and Christmas is tomorrow. Year-end in the IT business is a quiet time. But there's action in the advent to this period, if you look for it.

Hewlett-Packard has taken leave of action for these two weeks. The company has put on a salaries freeze as deep as anything now gripping North America's weather. The supplier of the alternative solutions for 3000 migrators will be shedding jobs as soon as 2009 begins.

"We believe it is prudent and responsible to reduce costs where possible," the company said in a statement this month. HP will reward "high performing" employees with compensation. The vendor reported record profits for its latest quarter, all while cooking up plans on how to pare down a workforce of more than 320,000. Even IBM's employee roster does not dwarf HP's today.

Employment is a 2009 issue for HP 3000 experts and veterans, too. Dale Pepoon lost his job at Circuit City tending HP 3000s last month. "I am open to contract or full time positions," he told us. "I am currently in transition. I have not been able to locate very many HP 3000 job listings, so I am trying to focus on my analysis and management skills when searching. It would be great to locate a company that is in transition to a new platform and needs the HP 3000 skills, but would be willing to train on the new technology or at least be willing to endure the learning curve."

There's hope for Dale. The largest migration services company in the community said that HP 3000 skills are even more important than experience in the target environment of a migration. He's also wise to emphasize the fundamental skills of managing enterprise IT. HP 3000 pros know much more than just the vitals of MPE/iX.

Circuit City has had its downturns along with the rest of the world's economy, the kind of setback that freezes plans to move away from the HP 3000. Hewlett-Packard, better staffed than any of its customers, finally turned off the HEART system on its HP 3000 cluster this fall. HEART tracked every beat of HP's orders for most of three decades. HP claimed long ago it had switched over every crucial enterprise app to SAP. Perhaps it's more true now than early in the decade, when the claim was made while 3000 Transition began. HEART had outlasted migration attempts for two decades, according to HP insiders.

"Most of you have no idea how big this is," said an HP VP to the internal IT staff in a memo, "so you’ll have to trust this old-timer… it’s HUGE!"

Other HP 3000s were recently turned toward the exits. Robert Mills announced to the 3000 community members this month who read the 3000 newsgroup that Pinnacle Entertainment "went into 'administration,' and I am one of the casualties of the first round of layoffs. I do not see Pinnacle remaining in that state long before they fold. When they do, that means that two HP 3000 979/400s will lose their home." Mills, like some in the community, is working at consulting that relates to the 3000 while looking for a more permanent position.

Unix is on the rise at places like Pinnacle, although it's only a 50-50 chance that it's HP's Unix taking over. Sun's solutions, and even SUSE Linux, are replacing HP 3000s. Oracle is often the platform in such cases, rather than the operating environment.

Meanwhile, Shoreline Community College, West of Seattle, continues to use an HP 3000 for its student information systems. Despite the best attempts of both Amisys and Ecometry/Escalate, both companies will have a significant share of their customers still running 3000s during 2009. Customers are just now considering replacements for systems like Series 937s, computers which were built early in the Clinton Administration. A tiny Integrity 2660 will replace a 937 nicely, and the 2660 is very affordable. The cost resides in moving software and training for Unix.

And since the HP 3000 is a big player in the history of computing, the history movement for the computer is gaining help. After this summer's MPE software history symposium at the Computer History Museum, Paul Raulerson will launch a history project next month, a not-for-profit Web site "funded primarily out of my beer money funds." Raulerson wants to preserve stories from the 3000 community, "and make them available to other people to enjoy and marvel at. The goals will be conservation and preservation of the histories and stories that surround the HP 3000 computer and related items of interest, such as the MPE operating system."

There's more 3000 history to be written in 2009, even as the effort to capture the tales of the past gathers volunteers and momentum. But this time of year is well-suited for reflection and revising of career courses. As well as R&R, of course. We're taking a couple of days off from the blog to reflect on the big stories of this year and enjoy the gifts of family and friends. We'll be back on Monday with our 2008 Top Story list, along with a review of what we predicted for this year and how our forecasts turned out. Have a happy holiday.

In HP's lee, solo experts keep up 3000s

This morning is the first of a two-week darkness at HP, the holiday time when the company has closed its doors. HP's labs are going dark for 3000 customers for good. It's a time when the independent wizards will rise up to create workarounds for complex problems. The wind of HP's changes for the 3000, even to aid support, has now fallen. The community is on the leeward side of 3000 Island.

Independents keep the breezes moving, though. These support sources can be small in staff. But compared to the number of 3000 lab experts who will work at HP from now on, the solo supporters still out-staff Hewlett-Packard.

Some of the slightly-larger independent companies are making strategic resources available by region, so a solo provider takes on support of clients across an area of a country. Jason Peel, who’s part of The MPE Support Group, said that the 3000’s reliability and stability keep support demands manageable for a single provider.

“I don’t really get that many calls at night,” he said. “It seems like everyplace I walk into now, instead of lights-out, 24x7 operations, it’s no lights on the weekends. After 5 o’clock, most of the [IT operations] people are gone, because the processing just runs.”

Solo supporters like Peel, or John Stephens of Take Care of IT, work on other platforms occasionally. But they report that their 3000 work keeps them busy nearly 100 percent of their available time. Stephens said he’s gotten an MCSE Windows certification, but it’s the 3000 knowledge which keeps him in the IT management business. Much of the work is available because companies have no more 3000 expertise on the payroll.

“More than half of the situations are basically shops where the last known expert on MANMAN on the 3000, for example, has retired,” he said. The one-man IT shop, so common among 3000 customers, lends itself to a solo supporter like Stephens, he explained.

“We have clients that have five people in an IT group, but we have super-small clients who don’t have anybody,” Peel said. “While we were doing a project with one client, we were getting status updates from the senior VP.”

The smaller support providers find ways to support one another in the community as well. Stephens said he’s got backup from another provider, but in the end, “I’m the last man standing. I have colleagues in the business I can ask to keep an eye on things for me. But realistically, month-long European vacations are not in the cards for me anytime soon.”

Vacations and holidays are already underway in Europe, and soon in North America for many IT customers. HP is taking its holiday away from development and sales in this quiet time, too. But it's a permanent holiday for the 3000 labs which back up HP's support from today onward. The virtual lab of allied independents is leaving the doors open and the lights on for the community.

HP offers museum pieces

As part of its exit from the 3000 community, Hewlett-Packard pledged to give the Computer History Museum a chunk of the 3000's heritage, from frozen code to hardware that can still heat up a room.

MPE/iX software will become part of HP's donation to the museum in Mountain View, Calif. sometime next year, according to HP's latest update on its end-game decisions about the platform. Museum docent Stan Sieler reports that there are already HP 3000s of varying vintages stashed away in the museum archives, although none are on display for the hundreds of thousands of visitors.

HP intends, but hasn't made a full commitment, to make a donation to the museum "to help preserve the history of the HP 3000 and MPE/iX," said Mike Paivien. The contractor has been brought back to his old HP division to help sort out the final decisions about what HP will leave behind for the community. MPE/iX source code is among the vendor's donations, apparently in a format far different from the one which requires an application for third-party support companies.

"There will be hardware and some level of documentation across the HP 3000 lifespan," Paivinen added. "As with most donations, it's things that are old. We're not necessarily going to try to create a complete view of everything. But we're looking at everythign that we have on hand."

HP still owns HP 3000 systems that are churning out data processing for the company, and the servers are likely to be performing even while the vendor decides what to send off to the museum. But the definition of museum materials can be artistic are well as legendary, and at the least the key components of a legacy.

At this summer's meeting at the History Museum of 3000 software pioneers, one founder of this legacy pointed out what makes the 3000 a distinctive stop on a tour of computing history. "The history of computing is not the history of invention for the 3000," said Doug Meacham, the founder of the Interex user group. "It's the history of people coming together, like at the Denver user group meeting in 1978."

Community made the difference in setting the 3000's place in history, he said. The Denver meeting, less than two years after HP made IMAGE a fundamental part of the HP 3000 systems, featured talks from Adager and Robelle founders on breakthroughs in 3000 data management. The 3000 had three things going for it at first that gave the minicomputer a way to win a place in batch-ridden computer departments. It had IMAGE included, something no other supplier could even imagine. Meacham said "HP knew nothing about software" other than IMAGE, "so there were a lot of openings for third parties."

And the computer had a user group dedicated to it in Interex, one that worked alongside HP to help mature the 3000 into a business workhorse powerful enough to last more than three decades.

Source code can help support rise above HP's

Allegro Consultants is the keystone of the Resource 3000 operation, and Allegro is coming up on its 25th anniversary. That's only a few years less than the HP 3000 has been serving businesses, and Allegro's services now trend toward support of the community, customers using both HP's Unix servers as well as MPE. Allegro is glad for HP's offer of a reference source code license.

"For most of those years, we have been offering premium MPE Operating System support for our customers," president Steve Cooper said of Allegro's mission. "We applaud HP’s efforts discussed in their latest announcement and intend to apply for the privileges offered."

"The availability of source code access will allow us, as support providers and developers of system-level software products, to further improve our ability to provide 'at least as good as HP' products and services to assist customers with their HP e3000 systems."

Cooper points out that anything which HP shares on such a deep technical level will lift independent supporters to a higher level. If your support team has people who can read MPE/iX source, the HP license is bound to help.

This access will further enhance our ability to create binary patches to the operating system, which will make it possible for us to address future needs  such as critical bug repairs and security fixes. In addition, it’s possible that new functionality can be provided for things such as interoperability with new peripherals and communications standards.

While many HPe3000 customers have completed their transitions off of the platform, a great many others continue to run their most critical business functions on their trusty MPE/iX systems and will likely continue to do so for many years to come. Whether these customers eventually complete a successful migration or choose to remain on the platform indefinitely, HP’s decision to license the operating system source code should help allay many of their concerns.  And as always, we stand committed to supporting them for many years to come.

HP lists what it will end this year

HP's announcement of 2009 plans included some subtractions along with the addition of a new source code licensing program. Software providers in the DSPP developer program won't be able to get HP 3000 software from the vendor starting in 2009. The number of DSPP members who only have an MPE/iX membership is few; many more have ongoing memberships for development under HP-UX and Windows. Plainly put, HP won't be shipping free versions of MPE/iX to any developers next year.

Another loss won't be missed much. HP held out the possibility that it would convert HP 9000 servers to HP 3000 systems if the marketplace needed hardware. But after more than two years of making the offer, the vendor said only a couple of customers were looking for A-Class servers and couldn't find what they needed on the used marketplace. HP is ending the potential for 9000-to-3000 conversions, starting immediately. 3000 hardware availability has kept pace with the market's needs.

Another activity is wrapping up as well, but this one might be more missed. The vendor's liaison to the OpenMPE advocacy group will stop. Jeff Bandle, the liaison who replaced Mike Paivinen, is ending his duties. Bandle talked with OpenMPE directors in conference calls every two or three weeks or so. The communication is ceasing because HP's lab efforts for the 3000 are at an end.

The exit of a 3000 liaison is the one development that might hamper a community which remains in transition. HP's support operations would serve the customers well by reaching out to OpenMPE during 2009. The installed base includes interim homesteading customers are well as sites which plan to run 3000 indefinitely -- alongside other HP products and servers.

The vendor didn't list a departing liaison among its decisions of Nov. 25. But the community would be a poorer place today without someone from HP to listen to the challenges of remaining devoted to the vendor's first business server. Bernard Determe of HP's Worldwide Support organization was the last official to communicate with the 3000 community. Determe could build a transition team -- a concept now crucial to change in America -- with a designated employee to hear the voices of HP's customers.

Hardware, software -- both can be replaced or supplied from other sources. An open ear needs an equal place in HP's plans to retain customer satisfaction.

HP to curtail Software Update Services

As part of its November advisory to the community, Hewlett-Packard announced that it's ending its Software Update Services program for MPE/iX core software and subsystems. Starting January 1, 2009, these materials will only be available through HP Support resources.

Patches will still be available to the 3000 community via the IT Response Center mechanism working today. HP says the General Release patches will be available through Dec. 31, 2015.

The HP 3000 group at Hewlett-Packard had been supplying engineering for PowerPatch updates, the 3000 operating system tapes and other software materials to HP's support customers. Next year that work shifts entirely to the company's support operations. HP warned customers that delivery times may be extended as a result of the shift.

"People who have a support contract with us today should be contacting HP now to get updated media, versus later," said e3000 business manager Jennie Hou. "In 2009 there will be a different process to do that. It will be easier to use the existing process if they need to get additional software media."

We are saying to the supported customers that if you want to order your updated media (7.5, PowerPatches, etc.) to which you are entitled through the Software Update Services (SUS), we recommend you place the order now.  You can still get them post-2008, it's just that the delivery time will vary, as the Software Update Manager (SUM) will no longer be available on the ITRC. For the other customers not signed up for SUM entitlement, the ordering process will remain the same

HP's Jazz lab server plays final notes

Launched in an era when the Internet was new, HP's Jazz lab server for HP 3000 training, technique and tools will go dark on December 31. Third party resources are rising up to replace the hosting point, but HP's has ended its contributed software efforts, the MPE/iX programs which will not find a new home inside HP.

Jazz was named after Jeri Ann Smith, an HP engineer whose contributions and enthusiasm for network tools supplied a spark to the 3000's nascent offerings. By the late 1990s, "It will be up on Jazz" had become a common refrain from HP software engineers when they reported on the location of new tools and technical papers. HP reported yesterday that the documents will be re-hosted on other HP support systems. But the downloadable programs — more than 80 projects created by HP as supported software, or by community members in volunteer efforts — must find a new home by year's end.

HP said that Jazz is going dark because its 3000 labs will end operations on Dec. 31. Since the server is maintained by HP's lab staff, halting the lab's engineering means unplugging the Series 900 HP 3000 which has been running for 12 years. Bootstrap development fundamentals such as the GNU Tools, the open source gcc compiler and utilities ported by independent developer Mark Klein, have had a home on Jazz for a decade. More than 80 other programs are hosted on the server, some with HP support and others ported and created by HP but unsupported.

Fortunately for the 3000 community, OpenMPE is already working on a new home for the treasures on Jazz.

HP reports that the staff-written technical white papers and presentation slide sets hosted on Jazz will be available in the vendor's support system after Dec. 31, although pointers to the new locations have not yet been revealed to the community. HP stressed that 3000 customers should begin downloading what they need from Jazz today.

"Most of the content will be preserved," said HP's Bill Cadier, an HP 3000 engineer who's been managing the server's contents. "After the end of the year Jazz will go away, and some content will remain on other HP internal servers. We're also exploring third parties picking up ownership of the Jazz role."

OpenMPE can make that exploration a quick expedition. "OpenMPE is in the process of making Jazz's contents available on our new server," said OpenMPE director Donna Hoffmeister. The advocacy group is already taking on the duties of hosting a public access development server, the former Invent3k project which is closing up at HP this Sunday night.

HP cannot move the downloadable programs "onto the ITRC servers, nor to doc.hp.com," Cadier said.

"Anything that people will need they should download before Dec. 31, 2008," said business manager Jennie Hou. "That's our recommendation."

A brief list of some of the programs available for downloading from Jazz:

Open source software produced/ported and "supported" by HP:
• Apache
• BIND
• Many command files
• dnscheck
• Porting Scanner
• Porting Wrappers
• Samba
• The System Inventory Utility
• Syslog
• WebWise

Open source software produced/ported as unsupported freeware by HP:
• JServ
• NTP
• OpenSSL
• Perl
• Sendmail

Open source software produced/ported by individuals:

• Analog
• autoconf
• bash
• gdbm
• Glimpse
• ht://Dig
• mmencode/sendmime
• MPE::CIvar
• MPE::IMAGE
• NetPBM
• OpenLDAP
• Ploticus
• Python
• SAURCS
• SLS
• texinfo
• Tidy
• TIFF library
• wget

Binary-only software produced/ported and "supported" by HP:

• CRYPT
• DBUTIL
• Firmware
• Java
• LDAP
• LineJet Utilities
• Patch/iX
• VERSION
• VT3K

HP creates first MPE/iX source license

Tomorrow: More, on the closing of HP's Jazz lab server

Hewlett-Packard has reached into its recent past to develop a future tool for the 3000, a document to work after the company's end-game in 2010. The vendor still calls this period "end-of-life," but it is devising a means to assist 3000 survival after the vendor leaves the market. Many details of HP’s first third party license of MPE/iX remain under the wraps of what HP calls simple business ethics and commonplace confidentiality.

HP has turned to a resource which left the company, the retired HP engineer Mike Paivinen who heard OpenMPE requests from 2002 to 2007, to help shape this long-sought MPE code license. The license will cover "most of the core operating system, most of networking, and TurboIMAGE," according to Paivinen.

HP hired Paivinen at the end of this summer to work on the licensing project, bringing him back to the company as a contractor. What the vendor is creating will not give anyone enough license to build new versions of MPE/iX. Instead, a license for a read-only reference copy of the source will be available to some companies supporting 3000 users, as well as software suppliers. HP has not capped the number of licenses.

"There is no predefined number of licenses," said Jennie Hou, the e3000 business manager at HP. "We're trying to balance the need for HP e3000 customers to get technical support with the potential downside of having a large number of patch developers." HP didn't say why a large number of developers would be a downside. The company is licensing the use of the source as-is, with no support.

The source code is aimed at companies offering support or products related to the 3000. "The source code is going to be available as reference material for third parties whose business is providing technical support to HP customers," Paivinen said in a briefing. "The way we define technical support is investigating problems, developing workarounds and creating instruction-level binary patches that modify the object code."

A 3000 customer's status as an HP support customer has no bearing on anyone's suitability for a license, HP said.

The source code license is targeted at three types of third parties: 1. Those whose business model is to provide technical support on HP e3000 products; 2. Software providers whose products have an intimate knowledge  of MPE/iX internals, and 3. Software providers whose products emulate one or more aspects of MPE/iX and the HP 3000 on other HP products.

The license will not be sold as a typical HP product. "We're creating a limited number of fee-based licenses," Paivinen said. "This isn't something that's going onto the HP Corporate Price List, something anybody can get. It's a limited licensing arrangement between us and third parties. Therefore, it's not something that's going to be broadly available."

The license goes beyond the "intentions" that HP offered in statements of prior years. "This project is well underway," Hou said, "and we're working on making this possible. The details still need to be worked out, but we are moving forward. This licensing agreement will be made available."

But potential licensees are urged to move quickly. "The longer someone waits to express their interest, the less likely that they would become a licensee," Hou said.

HP will be looking for people who are likely to be capable and responsible licensees of the 3000, and have a track record with the 3000 community. "I don't think you could say that everybody who is supporting 3000 customers is necessarily going to be granted a license to the source code," Paivinen said.

Starting Jan. 1, 2011 - after HP ends the last of its 3000 support - outside vendors can start using source as reference to create patches which modify MPE/iX object code. As such, this license does not enable changes to the operating system source. "It's for use as reference material, that the key," Paivinen said.

HP would not identify, in a discussion with the NewsWire, which parts of the MPE/iX core and networking code will be omitted from the license. Paivinen confirmed that third party intellectual property rights are an issue in releasing some parts of MPE/iX. During user group discussions, members at all levels of the 3000 community identified MPE/iX's streaming module (written by Mentat) and the Posix interface (created for HP by MKS) as third-party portions of the OS.

While not naming these segments as specifically missing from the source license, Paivinen said "We have to honor the agreements with people who have licensed us source code."

HP would not identify what parts of the company will be involved in establishing licenses with third parties. Getting a license established with HP starts with a query. The e-mail requests, aimed at a new e3000.migration-center@hp.com address, will arrive in Hou's mailbox to start screening and negotiations. But HP would only say that the rest of the process "will begin on the back end."

HP said it expects OpenMPE to request to become a licensee, but the vendor will not comment on the suitability of any potential licensee. OpenMPE falls outside of both HP targets for a licensee as defined on the November Web page. OpenMPE does not supply either support or a software product for 3000 customers -- although the organization has an extensive, and some might say impressive, record with the community.

HP will not make information public on when the source licensing process will be finished, although it is considering how it might allow licensees to tell the community about their status with HP. "Internal workings like that are typically not something we talk to the press about," Paivinen said.

HP has started the process of accepting e-mail queries from interested third parties. HP said that the license terms are nearly complete. "The development of the license agreement is nearly complete and we are ready to begin reviewing requests from potential licensees as they come in," said Hou. The vendor says that the project is funded and staffed and moving.

The timing of the release of source - the start of 2011 - is later than some have requested. OpenMPE has been pushing for an immediate pass-off of MPE source, but HP's timeline will be farther into the future. The advocacy group has tried to ensure that when HP's lab services end next month, an alternative from OpenMPE would be available.

HP is more focused on doing what it can to prevent a gap in support, rather than MPE/iX development. "We're trying to make it work so that [the support] transition is as smooth as possible," Paivinen said. "Our intention is not that there be a gap between HP providing support, and third parties taking over that responsibility."

The license may help support companies and software suppliers to service clients "on what we call a binary patch level," Paivinen said. "They'll be using some sort of mechanism that directly edits binary object code, at an instruction-by-instruction level."

HP has not factored in any coordination requirement among licensees. For now, making patches consistent among the community's sites is up to the licensees.

"We won't be imposing any kind of organizational structure on the community in terms of how they choose to operate," Paivinen said. "We're going to be creating agreements between us and individual companies."

HP intends for the licenses to be uniform, however, at the onset of this process. Negotiations will be under Confidential Disclosure Agreements, a common HP condition for contact matters. HP would not promise that every agreement will be the same once negotiations conclude.

The vendor is now looking at the community-wide aspects of multiple licenses. "There's some questions that have come up recently about how people might choose to cooperate in the community once these licenses become effective," Paivinen said. "Some questions have been brought up that we hadn't originally thought of, that we need to go back and think about and try and understand."

HP is still "strongly recommending for people to transition off the 3000." HP's e3000 Web page will continue to provide information on transition services and materials.

HP touts Q4 figures in report

HP considered the last two months of its fourth quarter as a tough stretch of road. But today the vendor put a bright face on strong financials from that period, toting up record sales for Q4 as well as for for fiscal 2008. CEO Mark Hurd stressed ongoing cost cutting and confidence in the future. But HP's leader said the vendor had to do its work to make sure that Q4 would deliver extra profits as well as the sales increases buoyed by new acquistion EDS.

"These results demonstrate our ability to execute in a challenging market," Hurd said in a conference call and financials presentation with investment analysts. "Great companies excel in tough times, and in tough times customers turn to great companies. "I'm confident in HP's ability to gain share, expand earnings and emerge from the current environment as a stronger force in the marketplace."

While the HP services and support sector is expected to withstand the downturn in the economy, analysts show concern over the hardware-based parts of HP's business such as business servers. Figures from the report show Enterprise Storage and Servers, which delivers HP's 3000 alternatives such as Industry Standard Windows systems and the HP Unix Business Critical Server, saw revenues down 1 percent year to year. The Business Critical Servers revenue dropped 10 percent overall, while Integrity systems sales rose 6 percent.

Integrity now represents 83 percent of BCS revenues. HP blade server revenues, which includes some Integrity systems, rose 33 percent from the same period last year.

HP's services doubled revenues from the prior Q4, figures which in large measure were the result of adding EDS business. Meanwhile, Enterprise Storage and Servers saw its quarterly operating profits fall $31 million from the past year's final quarter. ESS was the only HP unit to show a decline in profits compared to Q4 of 2007.

But earnings per share overall for HP reached a record high at $1.03, when calculated outside of the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP). Despite the falling profits at ESS, Hurd said that HP believes it held or gained share in each of its segments.

Hurd said he's confident of HP's financial position, in spite of what he called "macro-economic challenges," for reasons that include continued cost-cutting. "Our company is leaner, and more flexible than ever, and yet we still have more work to do [on cost structure], which is actually good news," he said. "We will be tightening discretionary spending given the environment."

HP also feels confident because one-third of its revenues and more than half of its profits come from "recurring sources such as services and supplies," Hurd said. While the company may be selling fewer systems in the year to come, support contracts for installed hardware look stable, and printers will always need ink and paper. HP is also running the company on 65 percent fewer applications, a simpler platform on which HP can innovate, Hurd said.

"This is a big deal for us. The market is getting tougher and less predictable. That said, an environment like this provides an opening for a company like HP to improve its competitive position. We have every intention of taking advantage of that opportunity."