Luke Leighton - Samba TNG

FreeDCE

FreeDCE is the GNU Autoconf'd version of the OSF's DCE 1.1 Reference implementation. When it was released a few years ago, 250 thousand lines of code was a significant project. Now, compared to KDE, Gnome, Python, Perl and other well-known Open Source projects, it is tiny by comparison.

FreeDCE is incredibly well designed; is modular in a way that puts projects written in OO languages to shame; and is a critical step to allowing Linux and other Open Source OSes to enter both the multi-million dollar government and enterprise business marketplace of middleware application development AND to take on Microsoft's strategic core business - DCOM, MS-Exchange and MS-SQL, all of which is based on DCE/RPC.

DCE is Middleware. It is therefore about as sexy as an ice shower in a Russian winter. This helps to explain why the number of Open Source developers on FreeDCE is zero. The Introduction to FreeDCE will explain the codebase and the main modular interfaces - the transport, security and IDL back-end generation, to give potential developers a place to start from, should cold showers actually do anything for them.