Wine and industrial communication like OPC

[michael at cherryblossom.homelinux.com]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 10:14:50AM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> >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.

Ditto.

> >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 
Are they already using it?  Maybe they're just looking at options right now.
> pay for Windows on a per-system basis? No? Or do you get bulk deals ...

Well, even here, buying a site licence (even for 98 or ME or something) 
should cost much less than $3000-4000 for the native solution, (right?)
and you could always say have Windows on the embedded device and
disabled (or included on a useless CD packaged with the device) and then
use the single dll or group of dlls to do RPC in wine on Linux on the
device, right?  I mean, Microsoft would still be paid for their work on
the dlls, so shouldn't that be okay?

> >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.

And no one has come up with a low cost or open source Linux version yet? 
How unusual.  You could always ask people in the industry to help in
funding, development, setup, improvement and/or testing of such a system
(low cost or open source).

> >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 :-(

What about HOWTOs or guides and info on the experience?  That would be a
start...

> 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 this sound intreaging and a good concept.  Even if you start
small, (i.e 2-5 companies) the concept could grow bigger over time.

> 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.

Would in this case, you want to say that the funding would have the
clause that code provided would have to be LGPLed, included in
WineHQ/Wine, and would be owned by the writer(s)? :D

> Anyway, it was just a thought.
> 
> thanks -mike
> 

Just a few comments.

--Michael Chang