Mike writes:

> All of your questions and comments are much appreciated and will be
> considered in subsequent drafts.

My primary comment is that the restrictions laid out appear basically
reasonable, but otherwise completely unenforceable. They read as if they were
written by the corporate legal staff rather than an engineering crew.

For example, how is the restriction that MPE/iX is to be run only on HP
hardware to be enforced? That is a restriction that the developers of an
emulator would have to enforce, but only if they elected to. HP itself has no
way to ascertain if that restriction is being honored, and users will either
know that initially or quickly discover it to be true. If it's not strictly
enforced by the emulator developers, who are not HP employees, you can be
certain that that covenant will be immediately broken. The difference between
running an emulator under Linux on an HP PC is indistinguishably different
from having the same done on a Dell box.

In general, I've long believed that it's counterproductive to impose
unenforceable restrictions on a user community. By patently allowing them to
break some restrictions, all you're doing is encouraging them to disregard
all of the other, more reasonable restrictions. The mood among the HP3000
customer base is already summed up by: "well, HP screwed me over
significantly. I don't mind if I screw them over a little bit in return."

Similarly, how is the one license/one machine restriction to be imposed?
Again, that's beyond HP's control. And what happens if that one licensed
machine breaks? It's cheaper nowadays to replace the whole server than have
one repair techician look at the machine for one hour.

I understand that most of these restrictions were written in to satisfy
higher levels of corporate responsibility within HP itself -- and that most
likely none of this would ever have come about without your diligent efforts
in trying to satisfy those higher-level demands -- but if HP expects an
honorable customer base for MPE/iX after 2004/2006, then it must more
accurately consider the nature of the base and its motivations.

Wirt Atmar