There are a few considerations for making the CSY independent of Hewlett
Packard.

HP has done the citizens of the United States a great disservice by
discontinuing the HP3000 and MPE:  There are many Federal, State, and Local
Governments which use the system, and, by discontinuing the product line,
has imposed upon the citizenry of this Country a migration in a time of
shrinking budgets, such that we ALL pay.

In the State of Washington, there are at least three Counties, and probably
many more, which run at least a part of their business on the HP3000; the
second largest city in the State; the Department of Licensing; Community
and Technical Colleges; the Port of Tacoma… and the list goes on—and this
is just one State, not to mention the Federal Agencies, such as the
Department of Defense and one of the US mints.

Traditionally, governmental agencies will not fund a private concern for
the sake of a community of for-profit industries, and, so, asking a
governmental agency for even $1,000 per year, let alone $2,500 per year, is
out of the question.

The next area of concern is management of an independent CSY—particularly,
as I understand it—about half of the CSY personnel are in India and the
other in the United States, with a few in various other parts of the world;
if this be so, how will the infrastructure be administered? How will the
people be managed? How will the goals be set and performance measured?

The next area of concern is how various parts of MPE are integrated.

For example:  It took the CSY seven months to fix certain problems I had
discovered while experimenting and trying to get the Apache-Java server
going, [and in the final analysis it was because we did not license the DS
component of the operating system]; it was clear that the intended
functions we needed SHOULD HAVE been embedded in the FOS, but they were
not, and, so, we got the DSLINE functionality for essentially the price of
maintenance.

It was also my understanding that a certain ALLBASE problem had not been
resolved after 18 months of work.

If the CSY claims that it would take 100 person years for a minimum of six
elapsed years to port to IA64, then what confidence would we have their
attempting to port MPE to anything beyond the current RISC environment?

As one who was exposed to a project to replace the HP3000 in 36 plants by a
certain misfortune 500 company, using $100 million to place five NT boxes
and one HP-UX in every plant, taking three years to essentially pretty much
fail, and having to spend $3 million to get the existing classic machines
(mostly Series 70s) ready for the year 2,000, I am very skeptical of the
potential for success for such an unwieldy project as modifying MPE to run
on top of LINUX; the potential for failure is astronomical.

Then there are questions of management of things like DTCs—now there is a
nightmare for most of us—though it might be simple to implement a terminal
server environment, it is yet another subsystem which needs considerable
thought before any migration.

Then there is the question of emulating the emulated compatibility mode:
Think SLOW.

Then there are migrations of people:  Some of the best of CSY have no doubt
been looking for employment elsewhere, and some may have already been
leaving; others may have already been layed off—in any event, since the
current funding model is not from MAINTENANCE, but rather from NEW SALES,
the absolute life of CSY is little more than two years, in a practical
sense; is there a viable way to insure keeping a critical mass of the
knowledgeable people together for the next two years?

The best of all worlds would be an emulator board to run MPE on a Wintel
box, just as some of the IBM Zos – OS/390 processors do; but what are the
chances of that happening? Who decides the direction of MPE after HP?

Sure, anything is technically possible, given enough time and money; most
of us on the HP3000-L have overcome incredible obstacles to create
magnificent complex useful products, but are we willing to bet that we all
have enough time and money for this? The County has already mapped
migration to Sybase on Sun Solaris using PowerBuilder / Cold Fusion and you
can lay good odds that other governmental agencies are already planning to
migrate, if not already in progress as we are.

It is interesting to watch the politics within HP, what with a Board Member
being the one to map the merger and then putting Carly in the position of
being a pawn to take the fall in case it doesn’t happen—it is a magnificent
illustration of “Moral Mazes”, “Assertive Incompetence”, and “The
Management Trap”—and an indication that “The Good Old Boys Network” lives
and breathes in an insane environment which created the environment in
which the CSY at last concluded that they, themselves, could not cope with
what was coming down the pike and just decided to give up; the Year 2001
will be one that we all wish we could forget.

What confidence could anyone put on the future of the group under these
circumstances?

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