Wine and industrial communication like OPC

[Mike Hearn]

> Yyyy!
> I hate license issues!
> I can see that for many people this wouldn't be an issue, because they probably have some old Win 98 CD/Licens somewhere (if they even care).
> But for a company that would like to send it as part of an embedded computer with Linux I can se a lot of problems.

OK. I don't really know the details of licensing in embedded scenarios 
but I can see it would cause problems.

> But that was per development project, not per system we want to use OPC in.

Ah, I see. Surely if you depend on Windows though you *already* have to 
pay for Windows on a per-system basis? No? Or do you get bulk deals ...

> That is good ;-)
> In the industry we are a lot of people who really question the total madness of letting the OPC standard be that depended on Windows, when it is supposed to be a "free" organization.
 >
> My hope if I can get this to work is to publish a site on the net so all who want to use Linux in the industrial computing can do that quite easy...
> But then we have the license issues to :-(

Yes. Unfortunately there are (as far as I know) only 4 DCOM 
implementations in the world:

1) the one in Microsoft Windows
2) DCOM for UNIX, which is based on Microsofts code
3) Wines
4) Cedegas (this is similar to Wines but more advanced, at least for 
InstallShield support)

The only one that is under a liberal license is Wines which is 
incomplete. The only way to solve this problem is by having a 
free-as-in-speech implementation of DCOM, which means extending and 
improving Wine.

> Ok, now I understand, and also why I got confused before.
> 
> And there is a lot of work needed to make DCom to work in Wine?
> Is someone working on it or is it something that not is that important in other cases?

Yes, it's a fair amount of work. Currently nobody is working on it as 
their primary project - Rob Shearman and I did some work on it for 
iTunes/InstallShield support lately and most of our code is motivated by 
InstallShield.

It is something that we want to do though, because we currently depend 
on native DCOM for a lot of stuff, like installers/office embedding/etc 
etc ... so there's interest there at least from CodeWeavers side. But 
we're certainly not committed to anything.

One possible plan is this: if it is true that there is general, 
widespread concern over OPC depending on Windows in the industry, 
perhaps you could get together with other companies and form a 
consortium to fund the development of an LGPLd DCOM implementation in 
Wine. This would allow you to write DCOM based software anywhere that 
Wine runs and be independent of Microsoft and licensing costs.

I think if funding was available in the right amounts Jeremy could be 
persuaded to have CW at least put some hours into it and I know at least 
one guy from ReactOS wants to work on it too. But I can't say for sure.

Anyway, it was just a thought.

thanks -mike