As of 1995, all major computer hardware vendors had an implementation of DCE, seen as an advantage compared to alternatives like CORBA which all had more limited support.
Any machine on the network can authenticate its users, gain access to resources, and call them remotely using a single integrated API.
The rise of the Internet, Java and web services stole much of DCE's mindshare through the mid-to-late 1990s, and competing systems such as CORBA appeared as well.
One of the major uses of DCE today is Microsoft's DCOM and ODBC systems, which use DCE/RPC (in MSRPC) as their network transport layer.
[citation needed] OSF and its projects eventually became part of The Open Group, which released DCE 1.2.2 under a free software license (the LGPL) on 12 January 2005.
[7] One of the major systems built on top of DCE was Encina, developed by Transarc (later acquired by IBM).
In addition to this, specific users or groups can be assigned privileges on any DCE resource, something which is not possible with the traditional UNIX filesystem, which lacks ACL's.
[7] DCE/DFS was sufficiently reliable and stable to be utilised by IBM to run the back-end filesystem for the 1996 Olympics web site, seamlessly and automatically distributed and edited worldwide in different time zones.