My apologies for not announcing this sonner, but it seems that the DCE RPC documentation package, which many of you kindly donated funds for, is a no-go. I've spent some time researching what, if anything, we need from OpenGroup, and unfortunately, I've never been able to get a coherent answer, even from OpenGroup's sales people.
Part of the problem seems to be that the DCE standard is "discontinued" by OpenGroup as a project. We wouldn't care if we knew what documents had relevance to wine. But it turns out that DCE covers a lot more than just RPC, most of which is not of interest to wine's RPC implementation. The RPC part of the standard, as far as I can tell, is freely available for download, including the fascinating "DCOM/ActiveX" standard (which refers to a separate ORPC standards document I have been unable to find, I'm afraid, to document the ORPC wire protocol :(; btw, I think Microsoft let their similar document fall of the 'net as well, you'll see links to it in various places... but I digress....)
So, insofar as I have questions about whether or not there's anything useful in there, OpenGroup's sales lady is unable to help -- she don't even seem able to give me the information thats available on the website, much less elaborate on it. That leaves me with no choice but to guess what is useful based on the information available to me: which seems to indicate that we don't need anything we can't get for free from OpenGroup.
So, the obvious question is, where does everyone's hard-earned money go? I've confirmed with Jeremy that refunds are an option; if you want your money back, let Jeremy know, and presumably he will make arrangements with you in private to get your money returned.
For those of you who would rather have your donations go to some other wine-releated cause, the matter is open for discussion. One idea which has been tossed around in private discussions between myself, Jeremy and Dimi is to rededictae these funds to the Wine Party Fund or some other wine conference fund. Another would be to find some other documentation we need to buy and use it for that. But, it's your money, and since every contributor essentially has veto power over their own portion of the funds, we obviously want to build some kind of consensus.
Sorry it took me so long to break this news, I spend a fair amount of time trying to salvage the original plan to buy the DCE doc's but it just didn't seem right to spend it on something which potentially has no value to wine... and then the guilt and procrastination set in... ;) Thanks for your patience on this matter.