In the lull around the year-end holidays, one of HP’s key 3000 engineers dropped a package of hope on the community about holding down the cost of holding on to MPE. Jeff Vance, who also sits on the board of directors of OpenMPE, Inc., posted a note on the Internet that summarized the range of costs for the emulator-based MPE licenses. Writing on the OpenMPE mailing list, Vance said that HP is considering a range of $400 to $1,000 for new MPE installations that would run under Intel-based PA-RISC emulators. Add that to the cost for the emulator, and homesteading HP 3000 users might have a hardware and MPE solution for under $10,000, when factoring in PC, emulator and MPE license.

HP hasn’t made an official announcement about the cost of its MPE license for the emulator-based installations. Vance said that “since several important details related to a final price have not been resolved at this time.... we will aim for $500, but a better range figure would be $400 to $1,000.” He added that the charge would most likely 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.” Vance said that HP pays royalties to MKS for their Posix shell and utilities, and to Mentat for their MPS Streams code, used in MPE’s pipes and other IPC functionality. MPS code is used by the 12H Raid Manager, XP Raid Manager, Posix pipes [pipe(), HPPIPE()], HP Predictive, CSTM, and Patch/iX. Vance also said the part of the license fee would go to MB Foster for its included ODBC driver, ODBCLink SE

HP doesn’t expect a lot of pickup from the customer base on the deal, apparently. “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,” he said. But some homesteading customers find the HP license and emulator fees a real bargain, compared to the alternative.

“If anyone out there puts out an emulator that is both functional and performs well, I would think a $500 license fee or a $1,000 license fee is dirt cheap compared to the cost of migrating off MPE,” said Zelik Schwartzman of Estee Lauder. “I for one would gladly pay double that or even triple that, if it prevented me from the expense and headaches of migrating.” And even vendors in the 3000 market can see the lower cost structure working for a customer base that’s used to the 3000’s bargain prices. “Faced with a choice of spending tens of thousands to homestead, versus hundreds of thousands to migrate or replace, homesteading may not look so unrealistic to a lot of companies,” said Tom Brandt, president of NorthTech Systems, an e-commerce integrator and supplier of Pro_EDI software for MPE and Unix systems.

HP’s 3000 business manager Dave Wilde said the company wants to release more license information after the first of the year; Vance’s message was meant to check on the suitability of the proposed MPE pricing. The HP price proposal might retire the speculation that HP’s heart is not truly in sustaining its homesteading 3000 customers, since it would have been easy to make a new MPE license cost a lot more.