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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...
In precisely the same way you can call your product Kool Aid, when it helps nobody, and is in no way affiliated with Kool and the Gang.
Or in the same way that you drive on a parkway, and park in a driveway.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The Open Group was formed by the merger of X/Open and the Open Software Foundation. The use of "open" in all those names predates the phrase "open source." The term it relates to is "open systems," which refers to standardized Unix systems, as opposed to mainframes.
It's basically a library of Open Source buzzwords, with which you can raise venture capital.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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!
Short answer : yes. Long answer : The code is Free means the code is Free. The code is released under the LGPL. If you can't look at the code and figure it out, what does it really matter anyway? On top of this, if you are involved in a large project with many developers chances are your organization will pay for it. The API is well documented in more places than just their pay-per-book service.
Of course the code is open... unless you consider man pages acceptable documentation.
And last I knew, those O'Reilly books aren't free either.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
lkcl covered the other stuff, I'll touch on DCOM.
DCOM is literally a reverse engineered DCE-RCP, to the point where it is wire compatible with it. DCE-RPC is an authenticated RPC which uses KerberosV for the authentication token, and since DCE puts group information into the ePac (like MS did with their Kerb) it also allows for group based authorization at the RPC level.
Microsoft ripped out all the security (who is suprised?) and called it DCOM. Of course the idl compilers are different so they are not compatible at that level, but once compiled, a DCE rcp client/server can talk to a DCOM client/server, assuming you are not trying to use any of the security built into the DCE-RPC
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