The Open Software Foundation last week revealed pricing and licensing details for Release 1.0 of its Distributed Computing Environment – DCE – although a fully-integrated architecture will not be generally available until early next year. DCE, which is a combination of software technologies for creating and implementing distributed applications, can be licensed as separate components, and is divided into two product rafts – DCE Executive and DCE Services. DCE Executive is essentially a combination of tools and basic system services for creating distributed applications, and includes the Hewlett-Packard/Apollo /DEC-derived remote procedure call, Sun Microsystems’ Network File System, DEC’s DECdts timing service and Concert Multithreaded Architecture – threads – for parallelism, and hooks for connecting to directory and security services. The single object-code licence fee for DCE Executive ranges from $75 each for up to 500 copies, to $10 for over 500,000 copies. DCE Service comprises the fundamental distributed services which allow applications to run over a network. Available in object form and priced separately, it includes the DECdns directory service from DEC – $400, the Kerberos security service from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Hewlett-Packard extensions – $400, Transarc Corp’s AFS distributed file system – $500, Siemens’ X500 directory service – $250, and the Microsoft Hewlett-Packard derived personal computer integration service – LAN Manager/X which is $800. Universities can get a single site source and object-code licence for the whole package- excluding LAN Manager/X – for $5,000. The Foundation’s final choice of DCE technology provoked a storm of controversy when it was announced back in May because it incorporates the Hewlett-Packard/Apollo Network Computing System-derived Remote Procedure Call, which is incompatible with the more widely-used Sun Microsystems Open Network Computing RPC. In response to DCE, Sun revealed a distributed computing roadmap which outlines the future development of Open Network Computing, incorporating many of the services available in the Distributed Computing Environment – it says that integration of these features is far advanced, and that additional charges will be made only where it has to bring in products from other manufacturers. Initial source code licences for three copies of the combined Distributed Computing Environment package, with object-code distribution rights, begin at $60,000 – or $15,000 without the distribution rights – with an additional $90,000 unlimited single-site licence fee for commercial users.
