Jeff contributes significant enlightenment:

> ....  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.

Note that if above comes to pass, it would essentially
be the MPE equivalent of getting the MS Developer's
Network (MSDN) Universal Subscription (1 copy of pretty
much everything MS makes except games, etc.) for $500;
compared to current one-year MSDN list price of $2138
(CAREFUL:  check the one that includes W2K)...  IMO the
entire OS *plus* (probably) the entire SUBSYS tape is a
WHOLE lot of stuff for $500 (if that's what it ends up
being);  that sounds like a good MPE license deal to me.
Even a total non-marketing type (speaking) could write
an ad on that one:  "Why pay $2138 for MSDN Universal,
when you can get all of MPE for only $500 ?"...

Plus I think it is reasonable to assume (I do NOT know
what the actual numbers are) that the royalties HP has
to pay the above three 3rd-parties are probably quite a
bit more than $10 or etc. per MPE license: Remember that
number of MPE boxes sold since above three enhancements
were added to MPE is tiny, compared to HP-UX sales let
alone PC server sales.  So it just would not have made
business sense for the above 3 companies to have made a
deal for just a few bucks per MPE license...  BTW:  WRT
trying to find out exactly what the royalties are for
each of the above products as bundled with MPE:  If HP
would have been able to tell us what those dollar costs
are, they probably would have done so by now.  I would
expect one reason they haven't is that most likely the
above deals include some kind of usual and customary
two-way NDA on cost per license...  Sure, all parties
could be asked to waive those NDAs, but what productive
purpose would that exercise serve at this point ??  I
would respectfully try and suggest:  Let's not go there;
there are many more significant issues that we need to
pursue.  As Cortlandt already mentioned, if HP ends up
saying they need $500 to cover costs, I don't need a
detailed accounting breakdown in order to be able to
intuitively stand back and say that sounds reasonable.

Given as Jon emphasized earlier that unlimited free
release of MPE licenses is NOT on the table right now,
and factoring in some reasonable amount for 3rd-party
royalties, I'll give y'all something else to consider:
While ex-CSY is still selling new e3000 boxes for the
next 10+ months, they will still be generating some cash
flow.  But less than one year from now ALL new HP e3000
systems sales by HP will stop (not upgrades, replacement
boards, etc. I realize;  but "full up" new sales will).
At that point I'm guessing it could be of non-trivial
importance for ex-CSY to be able to show their managers
that in the aggregate they are not going to lose money
in either the short or long run on every additional MPE
license they create and issue.  At least breaking even
will likely keep the entire "new MPE license" operation
comfortably down below the background noise level as far
as HP cost-cutters are concerned.  But having something
that pops up on the internal "net negative" radar screen
for many quarters in a row scares me;  even if it's only
a minor loss as far as absolute dollars are concerned.
IMO it's worth a few extra bucks per copy to help insure
the MPE license operation does not draw any unwanted
attention from the bean-counters;  especially after end-
of-HP new sales...

Ken Sletten
Member, OpenMPE BOD