The existing DCE licensees may be grouped in several ways. Here is one way of categorising them. Some organisations belong in more than one category! These are some of the major players in the DCE world, and a joker.
Once upon a time these organisations understood what DCE was for and what it could do for them.
The Open Group. Built DCE, but saw its licensees as the customers. Marketing DCE was largely left to vendors (who often had competing proprietary products to sell).
Now focused less on development, more towards a liason between customers and industry, adopting rather than creating standards, promoting and licensing their brands. Projects include "The Internet Dialtone", "The Open Group Architectural Framework".
HP. Supplied the RPC mechanism and supported DCE on all their operating systems. HP also developed OODCE to facilitate the use of C++ with DCE. HP-UX ships with DCE client programs, but is still based on OSF v1.2.1. Changes to the threads libraries in HP-UX 11seem to require changes to the source, breaking source compatibility with other DCE platforms.
Compaq/Digital. Digital supplied much of the technology that makes up DCE and was the only company to actually ship OSF/1. The current version of DCE is available for OpenVMS on VAX and Alpha hardware, but the development and maintenance of the Tru64 Unix and NT ports have been passed on to Entegrity. The DCE-based ACMS/xp transaction processing monitor is scheduled for "retirement" in 2005.
Borland. Bought a company and a product (OCE/Entera) that hid much of DCE's complexity and enabled DCE to be used from VisualBasic, Delphi, Java, COBOL and other widely-used languages. They developed a lightweight Transaction Processing system (Entera/FX) and a DCE-CORBA bridge. The products never prospered alongside shrink-wrapped PC applications and eventually development stopped and the support and development people moved on.
The rest ... Many of the original OSF members have now disappeared or moved onto other things; Apollo, Digital, Groupe Bull, Intergraph, NeXT, Philips, ...
Some organisations are still making good use of DCE:
IBM/Transarc. IBM supplied little of the technology, but it continues to make very good use of DCE. Transarc, now an IBM subsiduary, developed DFS from AFS. They also developed the Encina Toolkit and used it to create the Encina Monitor and CICS/6000. IBM uses DCE in several of its key products: DCE is one of the security options of the SP range of machines; the ComponentBroker Object Request Broker (ORB) is based on DCE as are the security products Global Secure Single Sign On and Policy Director (now part of the Tivoli empire). IBM include the DCE runtime components with AIX and OS/390.
Entegrity/Gradient. Gradient has been selling DCE for personal computers since 1992. It now also supplies DCE for Apple Macs and Compaq's Tru64 Unix and Linux. Gradient also developed WebCrusader to extend DCE security to web clients and servers. Recently Gradient merged with Entegrity.
Specialists. Several other companies provide products and services based on DCE. Focal Point Software and Dascom in the US and Santix in Germany have developed management tools for DCE. Farragut Systems provide DCE and DFS consulting and trouble-shooting. Treepax Ltd and Santix provide training.
Microsoft. Looked at DCE during planning for Distributed COM and NT. This caused some ambivalence in the DCE world: on one hand perhaps every PC would be able to be part of a secure, distributed system. On the other hand ... well, it was Microsoft!
In the event, Microsoft re-implemented the RPC mechanism so that it was "wire-compatible" with DCE/RPC but had different IDL syntax and API. This gave Microsoft a cross-platform IPC mechanism which it has used to implement other services and applications. The initial lack of distributed security and a scaleable directory service is now being fixed in MS Windows/2000 with its extended Kerberos and ActiveDirectory.