CDE released as open source

[tiagosilva29]

We have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I'm a huge fan of CDE - I've even dedicated an article to it --- so I'm excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later.

What is the Common Desktop Environment? From my earlier article on CDE:

CDE was announced in 1993, as a joint development effort by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, and Sun. CDE was part of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE), an effort by the major UNIX vendors of the time to counter the UNIX wars which were basically holding UNIX hostage. The big UNIX guys realised that Microsoft was making strong inroads into the traditional UNIX space (workstations and data centers), and that something needed to be done to make sure that UNIX would be able to stand the major competition they were about to face.

COSE had several areas of focus, such as networking, graphics, multimedia, object technology, and many other things; they wanted to ensure interoperability between the various UNIX offerings in the world.

Sadly, CDE was closed source, and as such, never gained much traction beyond big-iron UNIX systems like Solaris and HP-UX. The open source world focussed on KDE and GNOME instead, and while Xfce was inspired by CDE in its early days, it started carving out its own path later on.

So, yes, it might be too late, but that doesn't mean it's any less cool and awesome. "The Common Desktop Environment project is proud to announce the open sourcing of the Common Desktop Environment a.k.a. CDE," the project writes, "CDE was long the defacto standard among workstation vendors which enabled ease of software porting and training. It is still in use by Solaris (up to version 10), HP-UX, AIX and OpenVMS."

Motif, the widget toolkit used by CDE, will also be released as open source, but since there are still a few legal issues to work out there, this will have to wait. In the meantime, the project decided to move ahead with CDE, since it can be built using Open Motif anyway. (...)

Source: OSNews

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

For those of you who have never used or seen CDE, it's this beauty:

I'm going to install it in a Debian 6.0 VM later. For old times' sake - I used to use CDE on IBM RS/6000 workstations at the university. Back in the 1990s.

[tiagosilva29]

Glorious desktop environment.

[DeadEndAccount]

I know I'll be hated for say this but I'd love for CDE to emerge as the default desktop on *NIX to replace all the widget kits and desktops out there.

FreeBSD + CDE + Modernised Xorg + Modernised CDE (Anti-alised fonts, system configuration tools etc) and voila it would be an awesome alternative to those who crave something different.

[n_K]

Wow I've been waiting for this for a long time! :D

[The Laughing Man]

Goodbye Gnome/KDE/anythingelse

[tiagosilva29]

FreeBSD + CDE + Modernised Xorg + Modernised CDE (Anti-alised fonts, system configuration tools etc) and voila it would be an awesome alternative to those who crave something different.

FreeBSD, eh?

Hi, I am the documentation lead for the CDE project.

The people behind OpenCDE are involved with CDE as well. A FreeBSD port is in progress.

There is an issue with dthello that is making it impossible for it to run on other distributions other than Debain Squeeze and Ubuntu. It's related to rpcbind and it's being worked on.