Jeff writes:

> Wirt wrote:
>  > My primary comment is that the restrictions laid out appear basically
>  > reasonable, but otherwise completely unenforceable.
>
>  Thank you, and they are as enforceable as the license terms we
>  have today. We are trusting our customers, the emulator vendors,
>  and their customers to abide by the MPE/iX license terms. Today one
>  can copy MPE to another e3000 (illegally). Tomorrow one can copy
>  MPE to another PC, laptop, non-HP product, etc (illegally). Our rules
>  are like red traffic lights vs. a RR crossing. We don't intend to put
>  hooks into MPE to ensure that it is running on HP hardware. We don't
>  intend to ask the emulator vendors to do so either. We do expect our
>  customers to be honest and to respect the new MPE/iX license.

I have absolutely no desire to put the kabosh on anything associated with the
development of the emulator. My primary concern is that the underlying
premises of the document seem to me to be unrealistic.

The coming market for the emulator isn't going to be anything like the HP3000
market that has existed for the last 30 years. We've been selling HP3000
software for nearly 20 years now and I've been greatly impressed with the
honesty, integrity and honor of this community. In those twenty years, to the
best of our knowledge, we've never had anyone steal anything from us or ever
fail to pay for a product that they've ordered. That's an extraordinary
record.

But of course, to the contrary, we've always tied out licenses to the CPU
type and HPSUSAN numbers of the machine, for as long as those values have
existed on the RISC machines. "Trust but verify."

In this instance however, I don't feel that the past is likely to be a very
good predictor of the future. If there is a market for MPE after HP abandons
it -- and I truly believe that there is -- it is not going to be one composed
of "enterprise-level" customers for a long time to come, if ever again.
Rather, the market is going to be made up of small businesses, most of them
main-street, with perhaps most of them being web-based businesses. There's
extraordinary value in a simple OS with a very stable, very efficient, very
responsive database for these kinds of businesses.

A little while Gavin Scott wrote that he thought that every IMAGE database
that would ever exist has already been written, but just today, I built two
new IMAGE databases to serve two new auto-ordering systems we're putting in
place for our new PC-based products.

The coming market is going to be a market where the "DBA's" are kids, and the
kids who will be running the machines and designing the new software have a
wildly different view of software licensing restrictions than the HP3000
community has had over the past 30 years. It's my belief that they will take
these same restrictions with the same grain of salt that they did with legal
restrictions the music companies "suggested," once Napster arose.

If this should prediction should prove to be true, one of two things will
likely occur. Either HP will be spending a great deal of its time hunting
down these "evil-doers" and bringing them to justice, or it will just give up
distributing MPE/iX. Neither condition will be good for the long-term future
of MPE. We can't afford to HP be seen as a bully, and we certainly don't want
them to quit MPE altogether.

It's my opinion that HP and the user community would best prosper if there
were a better "impedance match" to the nature of the coming user community,
and that perhaps the best possible strategy is for HP to distribute MPE/iX on
one or several CDs, packaged in a nice black cloth zippered bag, with the HP
logo silk-screened on it, for $500, and only prohibit the CDs unauthorized
duplication.

In this model, HP would simply eliminate the unenforceable restrictions
regarding the type of hardware that the OS runs on, or how many machines it
has been mounted on. I'm virtually certain that neither of these restrictions
are going to be honored under any circumstance. Moreover, this is essentially
the same distribution model that's being used for Linux from the various
distribution companies -- and that if nothing else this procedure makes
MPE/iX more directly psychologically comparable with Linux.

That's not an effect to be taken lightly. MPE has some distinct advantages
over Linux. If it were begun to be well accepted into the same community that
is now using Linux, and the barriers to MPE's use were perceived as low
enough, I believe that it could become quite successful, perhaps wildly
successful. The upshot of that acceptance would be that HP could sell many
times more copies of MPE than it ever would have with very restrictive but
unenforceable covenants.

In every product, there is a useability barrier to the product's acceptance.
If you set that barrier too high, the product fails, no matter how
intrinsically good it is. But if the barriers are low enough and the product
is judged useful enough, the level of success can often be startingly high.

Wirt Atmar