Wirt writes:
> Gavin writes:
>
> > As a WAG, let's guess for the moment that an emulator license
> > costs $4500, making the total software cost for an emulator plus
> > an MPE license $5000.
>
> As a follow-on WAG, let me suggest that at that price, the total
> sales of the emulator/MPE combination will be less than 50 copies.

If this is true, then I think it may be the last nail in the coffin for an
independently developed commercial emulator product.

Even if the emulator is free, I think the market for true commercial use may
only be in the relatively low hundreds of customers.  So with these
economics I really don't see any way to finance the initial capital
expenditures for development of an emulator based on income from end-user
sales and support.

The remaining options then would be for someone to pay to have the emulator
developed, or for a community-developed "open source" type project to be
undertaken.

If there exists one large customer for whom the emulator would solve a
"million dollar problem" then they could certainly afford to pay for the
development of an emulator (that might then become available to others at a
reasonable price).  Alternatively a small group of customers could split the
cost, or HP could choose to fund it.

HP's funding of the emulator development would actually make a lot of sense,
since it might not be very much money to them (considering the time and
effort they're otherwise spending to try to help out the "homesteading"
customer).  More than the money expenditure though, I think the problem they
would have is that they don't want to be seen as either endorsing *any*
emulator or choosing one of the competing companies that has expressed an
interest in doing the development.  But perhaps they could simply make a
donation to some group like OpenMPE that might then contract with one or
more companies to produce an emulator/emulators.

The open-source route is interesting, but it's not clear that the people who
have the knowledge and skills to do the work also have enough free time to
contribute in order to produce something in time be of value.  Also it's
questionable whether anyone would be likely to use a freeware HPe3000
emulator to run their business, and HP has said that if it doesn't look like
there's going to be an emulator then they won't follow through on their
proposed MPE licensing, so a group wishing to assemble such a project would
have to convince HP that it still made sense to license MPE in the way that
they've talked about.

G.