CDE Open Sourced

First time accepted submitter christurkel writes "CDE, the Common Desktop Project, has been open sourced by the Open Group. CDE was created by a collaboration of Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, Fujitsu and Hitachi. You can find the source here. It has been tested on Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu. Testers are encouraged to join the project. Motif will follow in a few months once some legal issues are sorted out."

Comments

That looks...

[kiriath]

Horrible.

=\

(Visually speaking of course, I know nothing of the innards)

Re:That looks...

[bigtomrodney]

Come on, seriously. It's CDE. You know, the closed source desktop that preceded KDE. To look at it in these circumstances and say it looks "horrible" could be compared to Windows 95 being open sourced and you skipping to saying "it's out of date". There's a massive piece of the puzzle you just skipped over here.

In fact, I'm left wondering if you'd even heard of CDE before this article. I hate to say it, but you're reading Slashdot - we expect you not to RTFA most of the time but to be blind to something like CDE is fairly unforgivable.

Re:That looks...

[LizardKing]

SunView was so much more than CDE. SunView was a complete windowing system and widget set, whereas CDE was just a desktop environment built on the Motif widget set for the X-Window system.

15 years too late.

[iguana]

Open Sourcing CDE? Seriously? Would have possibly made a difference in 1998. But now? Except for historical interest, there's no point.

Was a so-so environment on HP-UX back in the day. Gloriously ugly.

Re:AH AH AH AH

[ILongForDarkness]

It is still used for some things. For example Philips Pinnacle radiation therapy planning system uses Sun/CDE and sells for 80k a pop ~1-2M for a typical sized cancer centre to have a dozen or so stations). Yes it is ugly, but it works and saves people in highly regulated industries from having to rewrite a crapload of things and suffer through FDA, few generations of serious bugs (always bugs but when you change widget framework/potentially OS flavor you are asking for it) etc.

Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3?

[LizardKing]

LessTif is the (buggy, unmaintained, incomplete) equivalent of Motif. CDE was a dekstop environment that built on top of Motif, providing a kind of task bar and various applications. The only app that Motif provided was a window manager. KDE started as an attempt to provided something similar to CDE, but under an open source license and built on top of the C++ based Qt widget set. Just to confuse things, Qt was open source, but could not be independently distributed with modifications. This licensing quirk, and a preference for C amongst some developers, prompted the creation of the GNOME project to create an alternative desktop environment built on top of the GTK+ widget set. GTK+ had started life as a toolkit for the GIMP image manipulation program - which to take things full circle, was initially written with the Motif toolkit.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

As a matter of fact, this is the result of a very long and somewhat big petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/opencde/petition.html
1723 signatures.

See also: http://www.marutan.net/cde/

Submitter/Documentation Lead

[christurkel]

I'm the submitter and documentation lead for the CDE project and I'll answer any questions you might have.

1. CDE wasn't open sourced years ago because The Open Group had a steady income stream from it. Losing that income stream would have meant people losing their jobs.

2. This The Open Group's CDE, without any code from Sun/HP/IBM.

3. Motif will be open sourced soon. We couldn't get contributor agreements from everyone so that's still to do. CDE builds with OpenMotif just fine.

4. A FreeBSD port is in progress