HP considers Open Source for MPE development

Initial goals focus on Internet tools in 3000’s operating system

Hewlett-Packard’s 3000 division is looking at all kinds of resources to help extend the abilities of its legendary MPE operating system — including giving the community’s most experienced developers a crack at developing parts of it.

In a discussion at this spring’s SIG3000 meetings, HP’s engineers and managers from the 3000 division (CSY) talked about the possibility of releasing parts of MPE to Open Source development. The example which HP examined in the open meeting was development of Samba/iX, software which began its life in the Open Source movement before becoming part of MPE as of release 6.0. Samba has made great strides since HP first took it into the 3000’s operating system, but the HP 3000 labs haven’t kept up with the advances. (See a related story in this month’s NewsWire Briefs.)

What’s significant about this round of talks concerning opening up MPE development is who’s talking: the top HP engineers and the developers from the commercial third-party software suppliers. The engineers with the greatest experience in MPE are being invited to help HP and the community.

“We’ve been focusing on Open Source porting,” said CSY’s Jeff Vance, one of the most prolific creators of utilities for 3000 managers. “We just had sort of a first public discussion at a software vendor’s SIG on that topic. The idea is to try to figure out what Open Source products CSY could provide that are not yet provided, ones which are considered strategic and would need HP’s support, and what Open Source products are not strategic and could be supported by the user community.”

The HP engineer was referring to the SIGSoftvend meeting this spring, a twice-a-year gathering where the community’s top software designers discuss technical details under nondisclosure with HP’s lab leaders. During a subsequent HP discussion about how CSY might bring new functionality to the 3000 faster, Vance gave his example of what could be opened up.

“In other words, for example, say Samba,” he said. “CSY could provide the source code back to the Samba repository, and if people felt there was value in Samba, they would port it to the latest version of Samba, and submit their changes back, just like what happens in the real Open Source world.”

There’s little risk to HP in turning Samba over to the developer community for improvement, since this part of MPE already thrives in the world of Open Source ports. But the software has become a supported and bundled part of the 3000’s operating system. Making its improvement an Open Source goal looked like the start of HP’s realization that development talent for the 3000 can work outside of HP’s own labs.

“Instead of CSY using up people to do those kinds of ports,” Vance said, “we could use those people to do those things that CSY is uniquely able to do, rather than a porting activity, which almost anyone can do. There’s discussion in that area, and it’s very much in the formation phase.”

The objective in this phase of the movement is to get software onto the 3000 faster. CSY Lab Section Manager Pam Bennett said at the meeting, “We’re trying to provide the Internet software out to our customers at a faster rate. Is there a way of looking at our partners to help them to port technologies? What are some models on how we can get functionality out faster than freeware?”

HP has tried other methods to get help developing for the 3000, but not with commercial developers working on essential, still-improving technologies. Customer Funded Enhancements got a run in 1999, yielding a JINFO utility from Vance. And the Shared Source project which began that fall has produced a handful of targets, but little in the way of improvements to software that’s essential to 3000 success.

Starting with Samba — an essential way for the 3000 to exchange data with NT systems and something HP calls a key networking technology for the 3000 — shows how serious HP has become. R&D manager Dave Wilde said at the meeting that faster development might include making HP test and development resources open to public development.

“It’s looking at how to get things onto the platform faster,” Wilde said, “in ways that are usable and sustainable to our customers. We want to understand what it would take to do that, and whether it would make sense to invest in things. For example, we’ve been thinking of putting a system outside the [HP] firewall as a test machine for things, to make it easier for people who don’t have a system at their disposal with all the right tools on it.”