HP has been reading our blog closely since the OpenMPE annual meeting last month, close enough to help us clarify what the patch plans are for the HP 3000 and its MPE/iX enhancements in the future. Mike Paivinen, the HP engineer who's the primary liasion to OpenMPE, helped me clear up what we've been reporting:

In the 19 August blog [Listen Up: 3000 Friends Want to Stay at HP] you said, “HP’s also committed to hardening device drivers for the 3000, so non-certified tape devices can be attached to the system to expand the range of backup peripherals.”  It would be more correct to say that “HP’s also committed to making changes to the SCSI Pass-Thru driver for the 3000, so non-certified tape devices may be able to be attached ...” It’s the SCSI Pass-Thru driver project that *may* enable attachment of tape devices.  The device driver hardening is more focused on disk devices. However, we’ve only committed to investigating that issue.

In that same paragraph, you also said, “HP now also has got a non-division, 3000-savvy engineer doing an internal review of its source code and MPE/iX version-building process — an important preliminary to a potential thumbs-up on releasing MPE/ix source.”  You should drop the “source code and” from the statement.  The engineer reviewed our build processes not the source code.  As you said in your 30 August blog [HP reaches out for its MPE bits], “HP is funding an engineer project this month to review its build process for MPE/iX, to ensure that an outside organization could find everything it needs to carry MPE development forward,” a much better summary of the effort.