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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."
Buh? The open sourcing of this was pursued by an external volunteer. It's purely for historical interest. I don't see how opening it is a disrespect to the "community" more than keeping it closed and letting it fester further.
The open-source code base for CDE is also nice to have in Patent lawsuits for prior art mining.
Yeah but not very useful without the full commit history so dating the prior art would be problematic.
Keep in mind a couple quick things.
CDE came out during the computer Stone Age. At that time, CDE was cutting edge, blowing away Windows 3.1 (yeah, it goes that far back!!) as a GUI. This was the 90's, guys. The 'decent' GUI for Linux at the time was FVWM/FVWM2. Compare screenshots of the two, and you'll know why I was envious as hell of the 'commercial *nixes' at the time. XFCE came out as a CDE lookalike/workalike. And today it looks nothing like it used to Back In The Day. Motif? Uglier than my ex-wife, but back then, it was THE widget set, nobody else had come out with anything remotely like it.
Today we have all kinda stuff we can drop in. More widget sets than ticks on a dog, 90 zillion different window managers/desktop environments. Even Windows doesn't look the same. This is a piece of computer history on the level of the old Xerox PARC GUI that mutated into MacOS and Windows. The 'genetics' are there for you to see, warts and all, in its pristine prehistoricalness.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.