Ken-
This is good news! I'm happy to hear the openMPE board is looking out for
it's users with regard to the long-term. An important consideration for us
in this, is the time to market. Every month that goes by without a prototype
of this emulator, is another month of searching for a migration solution. An
existing prototype and a plan for making it available for purchase, could be
the defacto long-term solution for those who have not already made heavy
investments in migrating to another platform. How long do you estimate
before a viable product exists?
-Karsten Holland
 MIS Site MGR
 NWS CORP. CHICAGO


-----Original Message-----
From: Sletten Kenneth W KPWA [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 10:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Anybody home? YES !!!!
Importance: High


Earlier today Chuck Ryan [mailto:[log in to unmask]] said:

> Can we assume that either the board has not met since
> September of last year or that they have decided to stop
> posting the minutes completely?
>
> As far as I can tell from this list and the web site,
> OpenMPE has been inactive for some time.

OpenMPE Inc. Chairman Jon Backus may be out of the office
today, so I am going to take it upon myself to reply, after
consulting with a couple other board members.

First:  I'd like to think we got behind on officially posting
minutes because we've been so busy for the last month or more.
:-)  ...  plus while that's very true, other circumstances with
various Board meetings conspired to put us behind on posting
additional minutes (mea culpa);  and we did have somewhat of a
"pause" at the end of CY 2002.  In any case, we just approved
several meeting minutes at a recent BOD meeting, so I think
we'll have 2 or 3 more sets up on  http://www.openmpe.org/
"very soon"...  Sorry about the delay;  I know it's been very
quite out there on the public lists...  Nobody has been waiting
more impatiently than me...

Because we are I believe SOOO close (at LONG last) to a
substantive and important public announcement on licensing of
MPE by HP to run on an emulator (one or more 3rd-parties will
have to produce same, of course), today I got permission from
vCSY to give the OpenMPE list a short "preview" of what I think
will come out officially from HP in a matter of days and not
weeks:

During the last couple weeks the OpenMPE Inc Board of Directors
(BOD) has been actively working on and reviewing a detailed
proposal from vCSY to make licenses to run MPE on an emulator
available, that will completely break the connection between
MPE and e3000 hardware.  There are only a couple last issues to
finally nail down internally at HP before vCSY can go public
with their new MPE licensing proposal.  If what HP makes public
is close to what we the BOD have seen and commented extensively
on, I believe most OpenMPE members will be find it acceptable.
We won't claim it's perfect, but on balance I hope it will be
seen as a reasonable outcome and a comprehensive proposal.

When you see it, please note that one of the things we tried to
focus on was long-term license availability;  i.e.:  Remember
that at end-of-HP-sales in just over 8 months, vCSY will lose
their main source of income...  and then just under four years
from now the fat lady is scheduled to sing for the HP e3000 at
HP.  So there has to be a way for emulator license distribution
to reliably continue in the future, AFTER vCSY has completely
faded away.  Without reasonable assurances and a "warm fuzzy"
that can be depended on, we're probably not going to get very
far with an emulator.

Anyway, when the proposal hits the street I hope everyone will
give it their careful attention.  I'm sure there will be an
active discussion about it on the OpenMPE list.  We the OpenMPE
BOD all tried hard to get the best deal we could...  expect we
will find out shortly if most of y'all agree we succeeded...

Ken Sletten
Member, OpenMPE Inc BOD