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Open Group Releases DCE 1.2.2 as Free Software
lkcl writes "The Open Group announced 12th January 2005 that they are releasing DCE/RPC 1.2.2 as a Free Software Project - under the LGPL. This is a major coup for Free Software: the Distributed Computing Environment is known to be involved in some major projects. There is a mirror at opendce.hands.com which runs rsync,
ftp, and there is also a dce122.tar.bz2.torrent bittorrent running as well."
This is one _monster_ big deal for Free Software.
This is the code that allows big companies such as IBM, Fujitsu, Entegrity etc. to bid for £500m contracts.
We have FreeDCE already, which is the DCE 1.1 Reference implementation autoconf'd and updated...
This isn't nearly as important as claimed here; other technologies supercede it.
How can anyone call themselves the "Open Group" and do anything but release OSS??
But, I figured I'd be socially productive, RTFA and post an explanation myself.
OK, now can I say "WTF?"What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Gosh, first Motif, now DCE? What other package that I haven't used in 10 years will be next?
It will show the non-infringing uses of Bittorrent.
The Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) is a software system developed in the early 1990s by a consortium that included Apollo Computer (later part of Hewlett-Packard), IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others. The DCE supplies a framework and toolkit for developing client/server applications. The framework includes a remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism, a naming (directory) service, an authentication service, and a distributed file system (DFS). DCE RPC was derived from an earlier RPC system called the Network Computing System (NCS) created at Apollo Computer. The naming service was derived from work done at DEC. DCE DFS was based on the Andrew file system (AFS), originally developed at Carnegie-Mellon University, and later extended by Transarc Corporation (which was later merged into IBM)
Link here
From http://advogato.org/article/817.html
P.S. did anyone know that there has existed a full and Free Software implementation of an X-500 Server? Only now are people endeavouring to make up for LDAP's shortcomings, ironically by adding exactly the things that were originally in X-500, from whence LDAP (the L means light-weight!) came!
http://opendce.hands.com/download/isode-8.0
This is a disturbing trend I've seen cropping up a few times lately, but it seems like all of their useful introductory documentation (at least what they refer to on their website) is available in book format that you have to pay money for. Is the code really open and free if you have to pay money to learn how to use it?
In '93, I was making the big bucks at a defense contractor because I could tell them how/where to use DCE.
It is interesting to see the difference between the openess of the OSF and the openess of the open source movement [all that gnu software!] begin to blur.
I hope that exposure of the security code buried in DCE, especially where it uses kerberos, will help polinate other open source projects with improved security features.
You call that a troll? I have a whole beltway full of trolls better than that!
It's been a while since I've looked at it, but wasn't DCE hijacked by Evil Empire? It was put together by OSF, now called the Open Group, and it seems bittersweet to have it released as free software now. If only they had the foresight to open it from the start.
The EOSDIS/ECS project. http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/ is a good place to start looking at the project I was on. It's currently the largest satellite data processing and science data repository on the face of the planet. :) (toot toot... there goes my own horn ;))
Anyway... DCE was used to tie several servers together which are the core of the system. I found it very reliable and solid (and that was several years ago).
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Isnt this the basis for Microsofts COM?
They're not freeing all of DCE, just the RPC component.
Since the introduction of DCE, Microsoft have felt the need to use an RPC mechanism, though they didn't want to write their own from scratch so it was suggested they use the best in the industry (already chosen by the OSF) - legend has it that they approached the OSF for DCE RPC but didn't want to pay the licence fees. What Microsoft _did_ do was to take the Application Environment Specification and a network sniffer and reverse engineer the DCE RPC. MS RPC is based upon, and, with a little application (Like OEC Enterra) will work with DCE RPC.
Microsoft DCOM is based on DCE/RPC. Now we can easily port the DCOM technology to UNIX
"Microsoft have felt the need to use an RPC mechanism, though they didn't want to write their own from scratch so it was suggested they use the best in the industry (already chosen by the OSF) - legend has it that they approached the OSF for DCE RPC but didn't want to pay the licence fees. What Microsoft _did_ do was to take the Application Environment Specification and a network sniffer and reverse engineer the DCE RPC. MS RPC is based upon, and, with a little application (Like OEC Enterra) will work with DCE RPC."
I used Motif yesterday in fact. While certainly ugly and headache prone, it does have some significant advantages. It's ubiquitous and available everywhere. It's fully documented. It has stable API (unheard of with other high level X11 toolkits). And it's much much much easier than using bare Xlib.
I wouldn't recommend it to most people, as it's still low level enough to bog you down in the UI instead of the backend. But it's hardly "abandonware".
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
This is one _monster_ big deal for Free Software.
It might have been 10 years ago, you know before people started using CORBA.
Microsoft's COM (also known as DCOM) sits on top of this RPC layer to implement a distributed component object model -- one of Microsoft's finest and most underrated inventions. It's also one of their most copied technologies -- KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice (UNO) and Mozilla (XPCOM) all implement very similar object models.
Of course, DCE RPC is also famous for the UUID (aka GUID) algorithm -- 128-bit identifiers whose uniqueness is mathematically guaranteed as long as the generator can access a network card with a unique MAC address.
DCE is the core middleware at PSU and has been for years. Your access account you use for everything is a DCE principle (Which ends up being KerberosV + some stuff).
:) It really was/is a cool and powerful system. Its one major failing it the complexity and effort needed to set it up.
The PASS filespace is DFS which is the distributed filesystem componant of DCE. Webmail and the Portal (wehmail.psu.edu portal.psu.edu) are built on top of the filesystem.
eLion is a client server application that uses Smalltalk on the web front end and Natural/Adabas for the backend (running on an IBM zSeries mainframe). A custom in house developed DCE RCP middleware mechanism is used to get them to talk to each other. This lets us do dynamic load balancing without special hardware, adding and removeing backend servers and automatically have them put into the locally managed "server pool" on each web server front end, and validating the calls on the backend via the kerberos credentials of both the web server and the user making the call. (can you guess what I did for the last 3 years?)
Now, IBM has end of lifed DCE, which screws us (and several National Labs, Merck, Cal Poly Tech, Buffalo U, Pain Webber, a handful of other universities, etc). PSU is migrating off of it to MIT KerberosV, LDAP, a "yet to be determined filesystem" (probably OpenAFS, which is a 10 year step backward), and I have absolutely NO idea how we will replace the RPC.
Anyway, PSU people have been using DCE heavily for about a decade and many didn't even know it
Finkployd
Its a long tradition, you have to troll or flame- admitting a mistake, even if you backpedal with an insightful point, is not allowed. Maybe you could try dazzling people with knowledge of obscure acronyms and technical references- and then lay on the bullsh*t
....It uses DES for encryption! Yuck!!!!! Big time! At the very least, they could have hacked it so you could use AES instead, if you wanted.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Enjoy
D CE.shtml#osf122
http://support.entegrity.com/private/doclib/index
so because you havent used them that is relevant how?
i.e. Let's outsource support for this sucker! I mean, how excited am I supposed to get, in 2005, about a techmology that allows me to marshall/unmarshall data and call remote procedures over the 'net? Isn't that already being done (a lot) by the various CORBA and RPC stuff already running on my Linux box?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Using Accentures implementation as an example doesn't say much about DCE/RPCs robustness. It has been plagued by problems as Computer Weekly reports.
Given what a good filesystem DFS is this will be nice to have access to all the features of DCE/DFS and give OpenAFS a run for its money.
But seriously DFS has a lot of core features that can even cause problems for DFS vendor Entegrity.
I smell a new project called OpenDFS
About 8 (?) years ago I was working on an architecture for a client server system - we had a mix of Unix and Microsoft servers and we wanted something that would tie them together so we could use the best that each had to offer.
From what I had read, RPC was definitely the way to go. I experimented with the Unix stuff and it worked like a charm.
Enter Microsoft RPC - after cajoling updated sets of working DLL's it worked just fine between MS platforms (Win 9x NT) and ran happily over TCP/IP. HOWEVER IT WOULD NOT INTEROPERATE WITH UNIX.
The Microsoft RPC implementation is an 'embrace and extend' derivative and is not compatible with anything other than the Microsoft toolchain. MS may have borrowed architectural tools from DCE, but it's an example of Microsoft at it's best - pick a good standard, bastardise it so that it only works within the Windows community, and then tout it as being a good thing.
It really burnt us
Apart from the press release, where does it actually
say that it's licensed under LGPL? The press release does not even make it clear that it really is the GNU LGPL, nor exactly what version of DCE the "Open" Group is supposed to release. But, if they really do release the stuff (although it's probably 10 years late), better now than never.
Try this -- MS
Try this -- Solaris
Preview exists for a reason, doh!
Tandy Corporation is rumored to have just made TRS-80 firmware open source. With the competitive race to open source things, several dead vendors are trying to ride on the OSS coat tails.
Rumor has it that SwiM Motif may up the ante. Not to be outdone, the Transmeta Linux distribution is being resurrected. OS/2 Warp may follow. Stay tuned...
Luke,
Indeed, this is a very interesting development. With an LGPL license for DFS, it's time to give the DCE descendent of AFS another look.
But we have AFS, too, and although OpenAFS is not GPL-compatible, its free software in a real sense, and more important, it has a living community of developers who've worked on the code stretching back into the 1980s.
I'm not as convinced now as I might have been 3 years ago that DCE is a better mousetrap than Rxgk is shaping up to be.
There will probably be crossover between OpenAFS and DFS ideas--I just hope that working with DCE people doesn't turn out to be a Samba/Active Directory driven experience. It would be easier and more pleasant to fork.
Matt
DCOM is still in heavy use and AFAIK it's using DCE.
we already have KDE and gnome.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/14/1 833226
Some clarification.
It's not just the DCE RPC that has been released, it's the whole schebang, including:
* The build environment (ODE)
* The vast documentation with specs
* Threads (Ugh!, Please don't use)
* RPC
* Directory services
* Security services
* Time sync
* File service (DFS) including the Episode file system.
* Test procedures
* The various administration tools
* The tools needed to make DCE applications.
The code is old, however and building this is not for the faint of heart, but there's lots of good stuff in there.
Nuf said!
I don't mean to sound like a troll, but what does DCE/DFS buy me now?
With kerberos, pam, ldap and NFSv4 it seems like alternatives are available. And the 90% of computer users in the enterprise needing authentication, directory service on Windows users are getting embraced by AD.
Plus, last time I remember using DCE/DFS about 7 or 8 years ago it was sloooooow.
"Provided by the management for your protection."