This is only an abstract not a submitted charter - md 6/29/92 This BOF will give IETF attendees an opportunity to learn more about the OSF organization and the DCE technology. OSF is a cooperative research and development organization chartered under the National Cooperative Research Act. OSF has delivered technologies such as the OSF/Motif graphic user interface and the OSF/1 operating system. OSF's most recent technology offering, the Distributed Computing Environment, will be of primary interest to attendees. Since OSF is located in Cambridge, we expect to have a number of OSF DCE engineers on hand for the BOF. The OSF DCE provides a full function integrated platform for developing networked applications. OSF DCE includes both a technology specification, available for use by anyone (similar to an RFC), as well as a licensable implementation of the system in ANSI C for computers using the UNIX operating system. Many leading computer system manufacturers are developing implementations of DCE for their computers. Target OS platforms include OSF/1, AIX, UNIX SVR4, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, VMS, MVS, as well as others. DCE provides services above the transport layer for use by applications. [The DCE implementation is written for the Internet protocol suite, but can be easily adapted to use OSI transport protocols.] DCE is based on remote procedure calls, and provides servers and administrative tools for network credential management, global namespace management, and a distributed file system. All services are integrated with threads, use consistent naming and security models, and are designed to scale to enterprise configurations in heterogeneous environments. In this BOF, we will provide status to those familiar with OSF and DCE, and introduce those unfamiliar with OSF and/or DCE to the current state of our work. We also hope to clarify points which have sometimes been confused regarding OSF's purpose, methodology and results to date. OSF's membership now numbers more than 300 organizations which work with OSF to deliver and enhance our system software offerings. We hope to work with the IETF community in areas of common interest. DCE relates to a number of IETF-relevant activities, including work on Kerberos, X.500, DNS, as well as popular distributed systems products such as NCS and AFS. We will clarify these relationships in the BOF. [OSF's Distributed Management Environment, or DME, will likely be the subject of a future IETF BOF.]