OpenMPE still open for MPE business
January 30, 2006
Even though HP put off its source code license until at least the end of 2008, the OpenMPE advocates continue to push the vendor for a better HP 3000 future. The group has elections coming up again this spring, a chance to serve the community many of you will be members of for the rest of this decade.
More important than leadership, however, is the 2006 mission for the group. First up, and very soon, will be independent review of MPE/iX build process at HP. The vendor thinks so much of this that it will pay an outside contractor selected by OpenMPE to do this review. The contractor — Mark Klein, formerly a board member and a developer steeped in MPE/iX internals, is a leading candidate for the job — will tell HP how well they've documented the process to create MPE/iX releases.
There would be only one reason to shore up the documentation for the build process of a 30-year-old operating system. If you were HP, you'd be ensuring that MPE/iX could leave your building. Not that anybody is promising when that will happen — but HP has said that it will license selected parts of MPE/iX to any third parties once HP support ends.
As for the rest of the 2006 agenda of OpenMPE, it appears to be up in the air. The group has wrested a lot of documentation, enhancement and understanding from HP about the 3000. That's the sort of work that a good user group used to do. We hear that OpenMPE will be forming up as a Special Interest Group of Encompass, the user group that wants your involvement. Encompass recently extended its membership discounts for former Interex members.
Since these two groups could benefit from one another, it might be a good idea to give OpenMPE members a discount to join Encompass. What better way to attract HP 3000 expertise?