Jerry Fochtman after Zelik Schwartzman:

>> Why doesn't HP just release the source code of MPE to
>> the third party vendors, collect some royalties and
>> be done with it. (bye bye HP!!!)
>>
>
> As I understand it, some components of MPE are actually
> owned by other parties and as such, HP doesn't have
> ownership and can't transfer it to others.  And to
> transfer ownership of what it owns to others HP would
> have to remove those components. This may cause some
> interesting issues, in terms of the functionality of
> what is left depending on what components are involved.

Jerry is correct about "some components".  I am aware
of at least three (there may be more):
(1)  The MKS Shell.
(2)  The Mentat (?spelling?) streams facility.
(3)  The bundled ODBCLink/SE ODBC driver from MB Foster.

IIRC there has been some speculation that replacing the
MKS shell with equivalent GNU functionality might not
too big of a job.  What "not too big" really amounts to
I freely confess I have no idea; way beyond my technical
expertise.

I have no idea on the Mentat component.

Birket would have to comment on ODBCLink/SE...

> It may also take a significant amount of engineering
> effort to pull everything together from all corners
> of HP, including all the build steps, so as to provide
> something that would actually do a full build of the OS
> and its needed components.  It's not clear that the
> Virtual CSY group currently has the resources to do
> this...

Now that we OpenMPE have (IMO) achieved a good initial
"lift-off" with what HP announced on OpenMPE issues at
HPW, we should probably start giving more thought to
issues like the one Jerry just mentioned.  I am not in
any way an expert on the HP internal build process, but
from bits and pieces I have heard I expect Jerry is right
about pulling all that together being a "significant
effort"...   remember putting out a full MPE build also
involves a very large and extensive suite of regression
test software;  that has been built up over many years
and that we the end-users don't ever directly get to see.

> Clearly not an ideal situation for those of us who
> would like to see MPE continue to live on following
> HP's EOL of the product.

Given that "end of HP sales" is now just 13 months away
and counting, no time like the present to start thinking
about and exploring options on issues like this...

Ken Sletten