Brian writes:

> A number of people have felt the suffocating weight of the monstrous HP
>  legal bear in the past and being right (which is not clear in this case) is
>  small consolation for the net effect of being rolled over.

Brian has it exactly right. Right and wrong have no relevance here. Unless HP
gives its blessing to Open MPE, then, as duane percox so eloquently put it
just days after the announcement, "MPE is dead. Get over it."

I have no desire to sound so pessimistic, but the sum total of my experience
with HP over the last 27 years leaves me with hardly any other conclusion.
Taking HP's word for anything has consistently proven to be a very foolish thing
to do.

But none of that means that we ourselves won't be running our HP3000's for a
very long time into the foreseeable future, for perhaps at least 10 or 15 more
years. I like the machine and we can undoubtedly keep our production machines
running for at least that long.

As for the questions about third-party vendors tying their software to
HPSUSAN and HPCPUNAME values, as we do too with our software, I think that you'd
have much more luck talking to each of your respective vendors than to HP about
releasing their grip on the individual CPUs. I would also recommend that you
speak with them now, while they're still likely to be actively engaged with the
HP3000 market rather than after 2006. Your third-party vendors are much more
likely to be responsive to this question than HP ever will be.

Wirt Atmar

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