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
