dear wine developers,
you may have noticed that DCE 1.2.2 was released on the 12th january 2005 under an LGPL license.
as you are no doubt aware, the significance of DCE/RPC is very, very high.
in particular, with FreeDCE using an NTLMSSP authentication plugin and a "Named Pipes" transport in samba or samba tng, it becomes possible for FreeDCE to be utilised to make DCOM applications work under Wine.
DCOM applications can be made to WORK under Wine using FreeDCE, Samba or Samba TNG with NamedPipes.
unmodified Win32 applications can do DCE/RPC and DCOM utilising FreeDCE and Samba, with a minimum of development effort inside Wine and Samba.
also, FreeDCE can be leveraged to provide _proper_ implementations of the underlying Win32 interfaces.
for example, REGEDT32.EXE can be made to work over a network running _natively_ under Wine.
NetUserGetInfo can return "meaningful" information. NetShareEnum likewise. NetServerGetInfo likewise.
the list goes on [to cover a large section of the Win32 API developed in the 80s and early 90s]
so may i take this as an opportunity to point out two things:
1) articles and news regarding the release of DCE 1.2.2
http://www.opengroup.org/comm/press/05-01-12.htm
http://advogato.org/article/817.html
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/14/1833226&tid=117&tid=1...
2) DCE 1.2.2, FreeDCE and Samba TNG have zero funding of any kind.
the possibilities are very exciting, yet curiously these strategically important projects that could remove microsoft's stranglehold on hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of home users world-wide are drastically underutilised.
i will do what i can, but my spare time (and elrond's) are precious resources.
the opportunity is there: all i can do is present it to you.
l.