February 2004

OpenMPE shuffles its leadership deck

Homesteader’s advocacy group changes chairs while HP remains inscrutable on help

One year after HP announced an intent to create new licenses for MPE, and two years after OpenMPE was founded, the volunteer organization has been rearranging chairs among directors. Some homesteading sites despair of these efforts being like the movement of Titanic deck chairs. Others see a titanic effort still in front of the group, one that HP might still be able to help.

Started in 2002 by instructor and MPE consultant Jon Backus, OpenMPE has approximately 125 official members after two years of meetings with HP and interested customers. The organization also supports an Internet mailing list with 361 subscribers, a forum where the future of MPE — and HP’s aid for that future — have become the chief topics.

Backus resigned from OpenMPE’s board of directors at the end of 2003, citing a need to reorganize his business around non-3000 work. After getting a dialogue started between HP and the organization’s eight-person board, and establishing the group as a contact point between HP’s 3000 division and homesteaders, Backus stepped back to advance toward another opportunity in Volvo’s IT group.

“OpenMPE, or the idea behind it, was a strong passion of mine, and I desperately wanted to see it through,” he said. “I am still a member of OpenMPE and have chosen to remain in the OpenMPE mailing list. But there is a good group of people still on the board, and I’m sure they will be able to accomplish anything they could have with my presence — maybe even more.”

Although the chairman’s departure was prompted by a business opportunity, criticism of the group’s accomplishments appeared at the same time he stepped away. One director published an open letter to HP that revealed e-mail between HP and the group, a message that director Ken Sletten characterized as stalling on HP’s part. (See our story in the January issue.)

The OpenMPE board responded to Sletten’s letter by identifying it as a breach of protocol. OpenMPE operates under an informal non-disclosure agreement with HP, so its communications with HP have rarely been available for public view. The board censured Sletten at a January 8 conference call meeting, an action that new chairman Birket Foster said must precede a motion to remove a board member.

Foster was voted into the chairman’s post from vice-chair after Backus’ resignation, and board member John Wolff, the CIO at LAACO, Ltd., took the vacated vice-chair post. Paul Edwards, who chairs the MPE Forum which organizes the MPE Systems Improvement Ballot, and has been a 3000 instructor and consultant for more than 25 years, joined the board to take Backus’ seat on January 23.

Foster said the move to censure Sletten “was instead of having a vote to remove him. It comes down to actions taken contrary to the board’s wishes that could lead to removal. We’re not going to do that, because I personally believe that Ken is a good advocate for OpenMPE. We don’t agree with his actions in this case.”

Sletten’s chair is one of five whose OpenMPE terms end this March, along with directors Donna Garverick, John Wolff, Ron Horner and Christian Lheureux. Sletten said he had no comment on either his censure or whether he’ll stand for re-election.

“I made the other directors fully aware of what I planned to do at a prior meeting,” Sletten said about his open letter, “and they saw a pre-publication copy.” He added that he intends to purchase from non-HP sources whenever possible — although in his job he only influences purchases — “unless and until there is an actual change in the ‘Free MPE’ situation.”

Foster said by mid-January HP had not communicated with the board any reaction to the open letter. The vendor also had not retracted its intention to show the board a timetable of HP communication about the active homesteading issues by Jan. 31. That communiqué would be subject to the informal NDA that Foster says the OpenMPE board will continue to honor.

Advocacy that’s not free

Foster said that OpenMPE has been doing advocacy for the homesteading community through a series of polls in 2003, conducted on the organization’s Web site. The polling takes time, and it’s not free, though HP benefits from it.

“It takes somebody’s time to put these things up there,” he said. “The chairman of OpenMPE was talking on a regular basis with HP, specifically with Mike Paivinen of virtual CSY. A lot of the talks had to do with what it takes to build a virtual lab, and what we might be able to be the custodians or stewards of.”

The rest of the OpenMPE board was sometimes briefed about these talks, Foster said, adding that he doesn’t know if HP asked Backus to post the current advocacy poll question: How customers would react to an offer to convert HP 9000 hardware to HP 3000 systems. Such a conversion could only occur by using HP’s SS-CONFIG program, software the vendor controls. The conversions would also seriously slow market acceptance of any 3000 hardware emulator. OpenMPE focused on the emulator project in its 2003 messages, and got HP to state its intentions about licensing MPE for such emulators.

Backus would not comment on the source of the question, instead referring the NewsWire to the current board. “We have made surveys of opinion of our community, some of which have been done at HP’s request,” said current vice-chair John Wolff.

Some inside HP want the 3000 homesteading community to cling to hope that such help will arrive from the vendor, even if on a different timetable than advocates desire. Jeff Vance at the vendor’s HP 3000 group said the potential still exists to get homestead help, even though HP is on record about moving as many customers as it can off the platform.

“Though it is true that vCSY does not want to encourage use of the 3000 past end of HP support,” Vance said on the OpenMPE list, “we are still open to licensing MPE source code, to enabling 9000 to 3000 conversions, to opening up MPE diagnostics, etc., to help reduce the chances that the 3000 causes negative business impact past 2006.”

“I do not think OpenMPE is dead,” Vance added. “I think they’ve served a useful purpose, and will continue to be important and needed in the 3000 community.”

“They really have been trying to figure out what it takes to do this,” Foster said. “There’s a bunch of stuff that’s happened that we can’t talk about.” But he added that “Time is running short if there will be a successful vLab.”

Customer perception of a lack of activity is rampant. Sites that have chosen to homestead are making their choice without knowing what HP will require to release the operating system to OpenMPE. Some customers understand how little they can press the vendor to reveal what it wants.

“We have no leverage with HP,” said Jim Phillips, manager of information systems at Therm-O-Link. “We don’t even know what they want to be able to give it to them. They aren’t willing to tell us what they want.”

The lack of communication about HP’s actions is leading customers to believe nothing is happening to help homesteaders. “As far as I can tell, none of the HP

representatives have done anything except stall the community,” said Joe Dolliver, an MPE consultant at e3K Solutions. “Homesteading folks are going to be an underground movement at best, in my opinion.”

James Reynolds, a systems manager at a mail order fulfillment company that uses HP 3000s, said that “I am even more convinced that HP is stonewalling and has no intention of allowing anyone to maintain and advance MPE.”

Moving the source code to a virtual OpenMPE lab might not be essential to maintaining the system’s value, according to MPE course writer and consultant Frank Smith. “Could I work with IMAGE as it is now, for the foreseeable future? Absolutely,” Smith said. “My suspicion is that if it goes no further, it’s still quite serviceable for many years to come.”

OpenMPE board members still expected HP on Jan. 31 to “provide a timetable for events we could expect from them,” Wolff said. “We are waiting for this information to be revealed so that we can then assess what the next steps must be to proceed.”

Foster said the group will clarify what it must do for members, and how much it will cost.

“We are going to boil down the mandate for what OpenMPE is doing, looking for input from the membership,” Foster said. “The board of directors will build an activity plan with costs. We’ll figure out what that would look like in terms of a budget, and from that budget we will then go and solicit dollars to be able to do it. Right now it’s not funded, it’s all volunteer, and in order to execute on any plan, including the vLab, we need to understand what it will cost over a five-year plan.”

“None of this is going to happen on its own,” Foster added. “It’s going to require monetary support from the membership.”

As for HP, the head of the 3000 business group Dave Wilde said he still intends to help OpenMPE help homesteaders.

“We’re taking it very seriously,” Wilde said. “We have every intent to do that, and there’s no reason why I don’t think we’ll be able to do that.”