What do you want OpenMPE to do for you?
July 29, 2010
Later this morning, another meeting of the volunteers of OpenMPE takes place on its usual conference call. If the group is fortunate, all eight members will be on the call. More likely is that one or two will have a conflict or a vacation week, so a half dozen is a more likely roll call.
This group is looking for something relevant to do for the 3000 community. This question -- what can we do for you? -- has lingered before OpenMPE for close to two years now. After six years of pursuit of the 3000's source code, there's been a void. It's a gap the group wants to fill. You might email your requests for action to new board member Keith Wadsworth, pushing for a business reorganization, or to mission statement committee member Connie Sellitto, another new board member.
We promised we'd only offer OpenMPE coverage if something happened. (The meeting minutes that say "Executive Session," sans any detail, don't count.) Perhaps by the end of today, a new host for the invent3k development server will be decided. We can't tell, because OpenMPE doesn't even post an agenda for any upcoming meeting. But this week the group sounds more serious about finding something you want it to do.
"We'll take the next six weeks to develop a mission statement," board chair Birket Foster told me this week. That statement is going to need response from your community. Just yesterday, a 3000 reseller said OpenMPE might do something to help everybody upgrading a 3000 over the next three years: Get clarity from HP on RTU upgrade license policies. The reseller suggested this because the OpenMPE of years past was always asking HP to clarify policy and procedures regarding the 3000.
One criticism of OpenMPE's board is that it spends much energy looking at the group's past, instead of ahead, toward help in the post-HP era. It's a swell past, yes. Advocacy established policies to license MPE/iX for emulators, and the group pushed HP hard enough to release source code that can help support companies create patches.
But getting answers to questions is yesterday's work. Replacing HP services and shaping the management of 3000s in a post-HP era -- by coordinating those new patches to identify which will break third party software, for example -- that's work needed by anyone installing a patch and using such software. That's a clearinghouse which might also do testing. Foster said he believes 3000-only software organizations don't run as many active labs as they once did. There are notable exceptions, leading the market with tests of HP's database changes, for example. But if he's correct, that's a gap in testing that a community organization could fill.
"First of all, they need a product," said former board member Paul
Edwards. "With the advocacy gone, they don't have a product anymore."
Nearly in the same breath Edwards sees a prospective need to fill.
"Right now there's no way to do comprehensive testing for the community,
and that's scary to me."
Then there's a service a community organization could do for software companies shutting down, but whose product is still in active use. Upgrade a 3000 running defunct-company software and you'll see the gap: nobody around to update activation codes for new HPSUSAN numbers.
One significant event over the past few weeks has been raising funds from community solution suppliers. Gathering assets is a more significant sign of a heartbeat than "Executive Session" meeting minutes. "It's a hard thing," said one board member, "to take a club and turn it into a business." That challenge will be easier if the customer community can add requests and a voice to the suggestions from 3000 vendors.
"We're getting a lot of input from vendors," Foster said. "But the other side of it, people running applications on 3000s, not as much."
Foster said he believes if the senior management of companies using 3000s were to ask their "3000-literate IT people, ask them what they'll next in the next five years, we might get a really good list" of how OpenMPE could help 3000 managers. "I believe a lot of 3000 people are busy doing their jobs, and haven't paid attention to this."