On Friday 31 January 2003 02:22 am, Ove Kaaven wrote:
http://www.opengroup.org/products/publications/catalog/t151x.htm
I can't find any legalese there to the effect of signing away my firstborn, they seem to just want purchase details. Care to elaborate? (And is it still okay for me to code on Wine even if my firstborn can't?)
and here is some free-as-in-beer RPC 1.1 stuff:
http://www.opengroup.org/products/publications/catalog/c706.htm
And on there, they just want to borg the email addresses of every reader, but not their souls or firstborns, as far as I can see.
hehe, you are correct, they are more like, say, the Borland Community site than Rumplestiltskin.
Of course, I was kidding about signing away your firstborn, although you do at least sign away any redistribution rights by downloading the free stuff. AFAIK OpenGroup/DCE controls the RPC spec -- expecting consumers to sign an NDA or something would kind of defeat their stated purpose of enhancing interoperability.
There is one really significant open question left by their documentation: what is the gap between "MSRPC" and DCE RPC? I still can't decide whether this difference is just an API-level difference, or a full-blown wire-protocol incompatibility.... Luckily, we probably don't care too much -- ultimately, if we can make something that interoperates with Windows, we win, regardless of how well MS complied with the spec.
The other thing I can't stand about their spec is the rediculous protocol state diagram style they use. Could they have /possibly/ made it more confusing and obscure? (Surely, the answer is yes, but it's pretty darn confusing).
But, it helps. I shouldn't complain, considering what I paid for it. Combined with the pseudo-documentation of the format strings from MSDN, the Microsoft headers and MIDL output, the DCERPC source, tcpdump, etc., there's enough comprehensible clues out there to actually accomplish something -- it still feels pretty sparse to me, but I guess there's nothing I can do about that but forge ahead (or maybe shell out for the DCE package :) )
--gmt