Well, this progress indeed.

$500 for an MPE license is astonishing value, especially if it runs on a
emulator on top of today's )and tomorrows) high speed Intel processors.

Will the license will be an unlimited one?

Will it be possible to run this version on "unsupported" A and N series
HP9000's for as long as they are available?

And finally, will the hated crippling software be carefully removed
before packaging? ;)

Neil



-----Original Message-----
From: VANCE,JEFF (HP-Cupertino,ex1) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 07 December 2002 02:33 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: MPE Licensing


Chuck wrote:
...
> Then it is an exercise in futility.
>
> The fee will not be determined by what we consider reasonable, but by 
> what these vendors will accept as a licensing fee.

I understand the point about telling the vendor how much
you'd be willing to pay, not knowing if they'd be willing
to sell it for less -- that's not the way I'd buy something either.

I appreciate Jon's effort to get this dialog going and it
is important for CSY to test the waters that the pricing
we are thinking of is at least reasonable.  So, hopefully without
getting in trouble, I will tell you that we are currently considering a
price of approximately $500 USD for one new MPE license. Most likely
(not definite) this license would include all HP-owned subsystems,
which, I
*think* is all of them.  HP is not trying to make any profit
on the sale of the new license. We do need to cover the royalties we pay
to other vendors for the parts of MPE that we have licensed from them.
This includes the following:

  - MKS for their POSIX shell and Utilities,
  - Mentat for their MPS Streams code needed for pipes and some
    other IPC functionality. MPS code is used by: 12H Raid Mgr,
    XP Raid Mgr, POSIX pipes [pipe(), HPPIPE()], Predictive, CSTM,
    and Patch/iX.
  - MB Foster for their 32 bit ODBC driver.

CSY also wants to try to cover our internal administration costs, but
those should be pretty small, since we expect the volume to be fairly
low.

I hope this helps stimulate more constructive dialog.

 Jeff Vance, "CSY"