Holding the line for & against RTUs
February 13, 2008
It's nearing springtime once more, and once again the HP 3000 community is exploring ways to flesh out new options for the systems HP builds no longer. Yesterday we reported here that Advant and Immediate Recovery Systems (IRS) have now partnered to give third party support companies the means to use HP's stable storage utility, ss_update.
The software lies behind an HP lockword, one which Advant, using the IRS software, will decode into a password for any support company (or any other self-supporting customer, we assume) for a fee. HP does not approve of this; the vendor has always insisted that 3000 stable storage is a system configuration which only HP can alter. HP believes that stable storage methods are a part of its intellectual property.
Last time around, HP created the first HP 3000 product in three years, an MPE/iX Right To Use (RTU) license, whose purpose was to clarify what could be changed on PA-RISC systems and still remain inside HP's license. This year, HP seems to be working on a reply to the Advant/IRS development. The only reply which HP could give us, when we sent the story into print within a whisker of our February deadline, was "HP continues to be concerned with protecting its intellectual property," from business manager Jennie Hou. That's the kind of placeholder statement Hewlett-Packard uses while it prepares something more formal and complete.
Which leads us to the latest option in the license arena. Orbit Software has offered VM+/iX since last year, its solution to increase horsepower and make PA-RISC server ownership more flexible. How this flexibility becomes a 3000 owner's option, considering HP's licensing intentions, has been discussed already, although VM/iX hasn't been mentioned by HP.
Let me take a moment to explain. Orbit describes VM+/iX as a server, according to the copy from the company's Web site. Orbit personnel install this server at a customer site, and in addition to your 3000 backups they need print-outs from SYSGEN and NMMGR off a customer's current HP 3000, along with a DSTAT ALL and DISCFREE C listing.
Orbit's Keith Wadsworth weighed in today with a statement about the current HP RTUs. "Our goal with VM+/iX is to offer MPE users adequate hardware performance and support options so they can continue to run their IT operations economically for the present and foreseeable future, while they plan and execute their migration plans."
More to the point regarding the HP concerns, Wadsworth stated, "We believe that original MPE software licenses do not prohibit using MPE on any computer hardware configuration that it will run on."
The balance of the Orbit statement included a reminder that HP told its customers about a five-year plan for 3000 development — which Wadsworth remembers HP stated less than a year before Hewlett-Packard started its public pullout from the 3000 community. He said,
However, recently questions have arisen regarding HP’s newer RTU “policy” scheme. It is our belief that the RTU policy and any possible future restrictions are an attempt by HP to retroactively redefine the MPE software license. However it is generally believed that the RTU policy is not applicable if users do not sign them.
Many will remember a flyer in May of 2001 in which Ann Livermore of HP stated, “So, are we committed to the HP e3000 platform? The answer is absolutely, yes! And how do we demonstrate this commitment? By having a 5-year roadmap for new product development. By bringing many of the latest Internet technologies to the platform. And by gaining new customers through vertical applications running on the HP e3000.”
We all know the platform was killed six months later and therefore users and third party application providers began developing new business strategies and plans for the remaining life of MPE.
Yet today many of us find ourselves very puzzled. On one hand HP keeps insisting (for over six years now) that the MPE platform is being made obsolete. On the other hand HP seems to be handling MPE as on ongoing business offering with a future by again extending product support and the RTU policy scheme.
So we now have more questions and fewer answers. Questions like: How do the remaining e3000 users plan? How do third party vendors plan? What will HP do next? And what do these RTUs mean to OpenMPE’s plans and other third party vendors plans and hopes for such things as binary patches and emulators?
The last sentence in Wadsworth's statement draws extra interest from me, since he is running this month for a board of directors seat with OpenMPE. Since the Orbit VM+/iX option is meant to improve performance and make support more flexible, this solution might be used at a customer site without migration plans firmed up. Yes, that's you, homesteaders.
We expect more on this story, perhaps from community members and partners as well as HP, soon enough.