So what are you saying? Is the current plan to have HP continue to develope
MPE but run on an emulator. Are they going to continue to pay royalties to
the various other parties involved?

Now that this is clearing up, it seem like a monumental task to keep MPE
going. No one else could do it since even HP themselves could not get the
whole source together for someone else to maintain.

Maybe this should be OpenPARISC since this is really nothing to do with MPE,
other than supplying hardware to run it on.

John Zoltak
North American Mfg Co
4455 East 71st Street
Cleveland Ohio 44105
216-206-5510



-----Original Message-----
From: Sletten Kenneth W KPWA [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 2:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: PA-RISC Emulator


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