Hello All,

I am a newcomer to the list and not a very experienced MPE person
either.  Some of you know me as a long-time Interex member and RTE
(the other obsolete HP platform) user.  I can't even begin to have a
reasoned opinion about MPE licensing, but I do happen to know quite a
bit about the HP1000 licensing program which might be of interest to
you.  Before I present that, I have copied a relevant paragraph from
this discussion thread:

> From the figures that you suggest in your example do I assume
> correctly that
> you are thinking that HP will want to cover the
> administration, paperwork
> and >>>> software delivery costs <<<< of licensing?   In other
> words the operation
> will be essentially revenue neutral for HP.   How close am I
> to reflecting your thinking on the matter?


The item highlighted by "> <" above is significantly different from
the RTE model.

The licensing fee for RTE is zero dollars.  This is revenue neutral in
the HP1000 world for the following reasons:

1)  There is no registration of the RTE product currently maintained
at HP.

2)  There is no embedded third party software in the RTE product, so
no royalties must be paid by HP.  CCS produced a third party C
compiler for the 1000, but that was not a standard part of the
product.  The leadership of SIG-RTE approached CCS and they agreed to
license the binaries at no charge also.

3)  The RTE manuals are not available from HP in printed form.  The
PDFs have been posted on the on the web and are available on the RTE
CSL CDroms.  This is the copyright notice from the CDrom: "These
manuals are copyrighted by Hewlett-Packard and can not be altered
without the expressed written permission of the  Hewlett-Packard
Company. This notice grants you the following permissions. You are
free to download, copy to other media, and print these manuals for
personal use only. You may not resell, in either printed or electronic
form, any of these manuals. You must include the copyright notice from
the manual on any copies of these manuals."

4)  The RTE code is not available from HP.  You either have it already
because you have had it for a long time, or you purchase it with a
remarketed machine, or you call up a friend somewhere.  This is in
great contrast to the paragraph I copied from this discussion thread.
In the RTE world, we are very much in the peer-to-peer support model.
We can't even get a known-good copy of the software from HP.

RTE is further down the obsolescence path than MPE, so the rules that
we are playing by are different, obviously.  We (RTE) reached our End
Of Sales date in October of 2000.  We had our End Of Support date
revised back from 2010 to 2005 in mid-2001.  I hope I do not sound too
much like a pessimist, but don't pin too many hopes on the MPE 2006
number.  The enthusiasm for world-class support drops off pretty
quickly when it must be supported on a bush-league revenue stream.

The sources for RTE are not available to the user community, although
the SIG-RTE folks continue to have hope.  This is partially offset by
the fact that there is a very good inverse assembler for HP1000 binary
relocatables available in the RTE CSL.  I have used it quite a bit
here at Strobe Data as we brought up our Kestrel product.  The Kestrel
is our HP 1000 instruction set and I/O card compatible computer.  We
have also benefited from and are very grateful for a good working
relationship with the remaining RTE people at HP.


--
Alan Tibbetts           Strobe Data, Inc.
Project Manager         8405 165th Ave. NE
425 861 4940            Redmond WA
[log in to unmask]      98052-3913