"Wayne R. Boyer" wrote:
>
> In a message dated 12/13/02 7:42:39 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> > Somebody (Gavin? Jeff?) listed some of the 3rd party stuff in MPE, but
> > naturally I can't find it now. I think some of it is pretty fundamental to
> > MPE, and just can't be left out without serious consequence.
> >
>
> I agree that some of it might be very fundamental.  Can't see why it should
> have a high royalty though.  MBF's ODBC sw should be very easy to seperate
> out from the rest of the OS.  As pointed out already, the 'full' version is
> available for anyone wishing to pay for it.

If a module is separated out from the rest of the OS, then the OS has
been changed and must be rebuilt and passed through the regression
tests.  Then it must be distributed to the users.  All of which must
be done by people who are skilled at making the changes, running the
tests, and packaging and distributing.  These people, not too
surprisingly, expect to earn good wages for their efforts (after all,
they live in Silicon Valley).  This means that HP has to spend a
significant amount of money to enable the OS to be given away for free
(or nearly so).  Somehow I do not think that Jeff Vance will be able
to sell this plan to management.  Call me a pessimist (or perhaps a
realist, sometimes they are the same thing), but the amounts of money
that have been mentioned in some of the postings to this list are much
too low to enable any company to produce a product which will meet the
needs of the MPE community.

Which leaves open source.

When I was on the board at Interex, and working much more closely with
my MPE associates than I am currently, I learned that one of the
differences between RTE users and MPE users was in the acceptance of
"alien software" on their machines.  In 30 years of working with RTE,
I have never once heard a customer say that "my management does not
allow ANY contributed software on my machines".  I did hear this
(second hand) many times when discussing the MPE CSL.  Given that kind
of environment, it surprises me greatly that there is any discussion
of an open source project for MPE.  I acknowledge that some of the
same management types that insisted "no un-supported software" may
have seen the light, since HP has announced that when viewed on a long
time scale supported doesn't really mean supported, but has enough
changed in the past five or six years that my analysis is flawed?

Perhaps because the contributors to this list are self-selected
homesteaders, there is more of an understanding that ultimately you
cannot completely trust any software unless you have the sources AND
the capability in-house to read it, understand it, and if necessary,
modify it.  That is the essence of the Linux way of looking at things,
and is almost diametrically opposed to what I was told was the MPE
customer's way of doing things.

--
Alan Tibbetts           Strobe Data, Inc.
Project Manager         8405 165th Ave. NE
425 861 4940            Redmond WA
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