There’s nothing like a few days of face-to-face meetings between homesteading customers to charge up the OpenMPE movement some fresh advocates. In the week following this year’s OpenMPE session at HP World, the advocacy group’s mailing list was crowded with traffic, discussing the design possibilities for the HP 3000 hardware emulator HP green-lighted at the show. The non-profit OpenMPE got a boost from a new contributor when HP 3000 application provider QSS joined at the Bronze Level — even though the company is among those ISVs which HP pointed to proudly as partners who’ve chosen to migrate their application to other HP platforms. Duane Percox, founder of the ISV that sells administration packages for K-12 educational institutions, said OpenMPE can help QSS customers who are not migrating anytime soon.

“While we are actively engaged in an effort to migrate our software to a Linux/HP-UX open system platform,” Percox said, “we want to show our support for the work being done by OpenMPE in working with HP/CSY to secure a future beyond 12/31/2006 for MPE. We look forward to the continued dialog between OpenMPE and HP/CSY on this very important topic. We hope some others will be motivated to assist as well in any way they can.”

The OpenMPE organization was taking another step to extend its communications beyond its mailing list and its growing Web site (www.openmpe.org). Chairman Jon Backus said the group is setting up a Usenet newsgroup, to give more open access to its discussions, an option that gives interested customers a way to to keep up with the fast-moving design and development debates without filling their e-mail boxes with messages Usenet takes a few months to approve such requests, but by early next year the group should be established. One of the more interesting aspects to this effort is the proposed newsgroup address: comp.sys.openmpe, a name for a group about the 3000 without the letters “hp” in it.