OpenMPE restarts its meeting minutes
April 9, 2010
After the arrival of two new board members, the OpenMPE advocacy group published its first set of meeting minutes in more than 18 months. Many topics were discussed in a meeting that ran more than three hours on April 8, but the group is discussing more than it is making motions to accomplish at the moment.
Tangible progress has been made on naming two members to officer posts. Keith Wadsworth has become the vice-chair of the group, after earning his first term on the board during last month's election. Tracy Johnson, whose diligent efforts made these latest minutes surface, has now taken over the group's secretary duties.
Wadsworth and Johnson have drafted a business plan for the group which has met since 2002 but has not yet released a product or sold a service to the 3000 community. No vote was taken as a result of a discussion about how to bring revenues to the group. The group has made one cosmetic change to the language in an updated Web site: references to "donations" are now being called "contributions." As for fees, the group is looking toward billing support companies for virtual lab work to create patches.
OpenMPE has not announced any members of its virtual lab yet, the group which in theory would develop fixes for MPE/iX problems starting in 2011. But a list of the prospective support group customers mentioned in the minutes includes the Support Group inc., Beechglen, Allegro Consultants, Gilles Schipper Associates and Abtech. New board member Jack Connor works at Abtech, while Allegro's Donna Hofmeister recently resigned a board position.
The nine board members continue to approach the revenue issues as a fundraising effort rather than a sales pitch. Fees are being discussed, but not proposed, for access to the Invent3k development server that OpenMPE now controls. One commercial company, which is not named in the minutes, is interested enough in Invent3k time that OpenMPE will be asking the company to resend a Request for Quote. These online resources represent the only spots where OpenMPE might generate fees, rather than reply on fundraising. One meeting item stated that HP has said source code licensees can collaborate with one another "for minimal fees."
More than six months after the invent.openmpe.org and jazz.openmpe.org were offered at the 2009 Community Meet, with an expected go-live date sometime in October, the servers are not online or open to the community.
Invent3K should be accessible in the same role as it had by HP. Invent3K-2 would be an internal machine. [Matt Perdue, hosting the systems] suggests the roles be reversed as the disc space is greater on 3k2. Matt suggested patches be current before going “go-live.” Chairman Birket Foster suggested “go-live” be performed and patches be done later. Matt suggests we need a policy statement and a fee structure. No vote was taken.
More assistance to get these servers open might be on the way. The group's next meeting, scheduled for April 29, will include volunteer Paul Raulerson, who's been working on a new Web site for the group. He's also been tasked with bringing the Jazz resources online for OpenMPE. Jazz programs are already being hosted by Client Systems -- which donated one of the Series 9x9 servers OpenMPE runs -- as well as Speedware.