CDE Open Sourced

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Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 6, 2012 @02:43AM from the set-it-free dept.

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."

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That looks... by kiriath · 2012-08-06 02:45 · Score: 4, Informative

Horrible.
=\
(Visually speaking of course, I know nothing of the innards)
1. Re:That looks... by dingo_kinznerhook · 2012-08-06 02:54 · Score: 1
  
  Seriously. Agreed.
  
  I've never understood why anyone would create a Gnome/KDE theme that imitated Motif. Motif is one of the ugliest, most horrible abominations to pass for a widget toolkit that I have ever seen.
  
  --
  "God does not play Minecraft with the world." - Albert Einstein
2. Re:That looks... by bigtomrodney · 2012-08-06 02:58 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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and say it looks "horrible" could be compared to Windows 95 being open sourced and you skipping to saying "it's out of date".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.
  
  --
  I never get used to these constant resurrections
3. Re:That looks... by bobstreo · 2012-08-06 03:09 · Score: 2
  
  Did they ever open source SunView?
  CDE was a much better interface at the time.
4. Re:That looks... by Xiaran · 2012-08-06 03:10 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Ah. I see you are someone who has never used Open Look.
5. Re:That looks... by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 03:19 · Score: 1
  
  You rotter - I loved Open Look, although my memories may be rosy tinted thanks to it being the first GUI I created apps for. I even have my XView programming and reference manuals somewhere - the API was quite nice, paritcularly when you compare it to the horrors of Motif (the widget library that underpins CDE).
6. Re:That looks... by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 03:22 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
7. Re:That looks... by larry+bagina · 2012-08-06 03:33 · Score: 2
  
  Additionally, early versions of GIMP used Motif. Instead of using LesTif (which was equally ugly but FREE), they developed GTK/GDK which was the basis for GNOME.
  
  --
  Do you even lift?
  These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
8. Re:That looks... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 03:37 · Score: 1
  
  Seriously. Agreed. I've never understood why anyone would create a Gnome/KDE theme that imitated Motif. Motif is one of the ugliest, most horrible abominations to pass for a widget toolkit that I have ever seen.
  And just to show how out-of-touch they are in *both* the world of GUIs *and* distribution platforms, they released it on SourceForce instead of GitHub.
9. Re:That looks... by Meeni · 2012-08-06 03:42 · Score: 1
  
  At the time, it was the prettiest of all. I mean it was so much better than XT or Athena.
10. Re:That looks... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2012-08-06 04:01 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  CDE! GOD YES!
  They say that good things come to those that wait, I have WAITED for 20 years, to see this day!
  :-)
  
  --
  "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
  Never been known to fail..."
11. Re:That looks... by Angrywhiteshoes · 2012-08-06 04:02 · Score: 1
  
  CDE is why I use Fluxbox. It's so bare-bones and easy to use. I really like the right-click menu as opposed to an icon menu or any other menu scheme.
  
  There's a lot about it that is actually really good. Not everyone needs Compiz and other effects layered on their desktop.
12. Re:That looks... by jamstar7 · 2012-08-06 04:03 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
13. Re:That looks... by StefanWiesendanger · 2012-08-06 04:08 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Looks like you might have missed NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP during the 90s... :)
14. Re:That looks... by matunos · 2012-08-06 04:12 · Score: 1
  
  I've used CDE, I was around in that era. It does look horrible. It looked out of date in the 90s and it looks out of date now. It (and Motif) was based on Windows 3.1.
  I do still use NEdit though. Fantastic regex support.
  And yeah, if they open-sourced Windows 95, I would say it's out of date. Who wouldn't? Who seriously want to build and run Windows 95 on a computer today?
  The only value to open-sourcing CDE now is for historical purposes (Motif at least still has some useful applications, although OpenMotif probably covered them a long time ago). They can send that code straight to the Smithsonian for all I care.
15. Re:That looks... by Eravnrekaree · 2012-08-06 04:16 · Score: 1
  
  actually i like the clean look of CDE and the fact it uses a fraction of the memory of all of your modern desktops with the memory hogging graphics and disgusting, nauseating, and ugly aqua themes.
16. Re:That looks... by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 04:30 · Score: 1
  
  It (and Motif) was based on Windows 3.1.
  MicroSoft were even involved in the design of Motif and CDE, which took some of its look and feel from Windows 3.1, although I don't think MS contributed to the actual development. I'm pretty sure the Motif programming manuals from O'Reilly even mentioned MicroSoft in the introductory pages.
  I do still use NEdit though. Fantastic regex support.
  I use NEdit pretty much every working day - it was even my main programming editor of choice for many years.
17. Re:That looks... by david.given · 2012-08-06 04:33 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  To be honest, it was pretty easy to miss. Yes, it was big in certain environments, but outside those environments it didn't make much impact. Sun shops, for example, tended not to use it. And it was very quickly eclipsed in workstation farms by Windows PCs. So if you weren't in just the right environment in just the right window of history I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't see it.
  My university was almost entirely a Sun shop, and the only machines that had CDE were a handful of god-awful DEC Alphas running OSF/1 and an occasional VAX in a back office. I'd been promoted to the Alphas from the SunOS 4.1.3 farm and I played with CDE a bit and was distinctly underwhelmed.
  (We did eventually get some modern Suns with CDE, but by then desktop use on Suns was already on its way out. The Linux boxes that replaced them didn't use CDE, of course.)
18. Re:That looks... by cheesybagel · 2012-08-06 04:34 · Score: 1
  
  They opensourced Open Look a long time ago.
19. Re:That looks... by SirTicksAlot · 2012-08-06 04:39 · Score: 1
  
  Yes we are! :)
20. Re:That looks... by J4 · 2012-08-06 04:53 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, no. Motif looked like shit even compared to Win 3.1
  I remember.
21. Re:That looks... by jellomizer · 2012-08-06 05:04 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  The time it was made it was a different era.
  1. Monochrome Displays were quite common (Black and White, Black and Amber, Black and Green, Black and Red (rare)). So they used a rather minimal color scheme. Unix systems were for businesses so they had to get hundreds of displays, and they weren't willing to pay extra for a color display. Windows was designed for the PC, where kids at home played games and spending $100 more for a color monitor was worth it.
  2. Low Color depth. Most systems supported 4 bit color (16 colors), so you didn't have that many colors to choose from. If you had 8 bit color then there was a lot a pallet shifting to get different colors... Every app you ran once you switched the window you colors would change.
  3. Slow Bandwidth. What a lot of people forgot or don't even realize X-Windows is designed to display graphics over a network connection. This was its huge features. (and today it can be considered it biggest drawback) CDE was designed on 1 Megabit or less networks and usable over dial up.
  Plus we have difference in styles that change over time...
  We tend to go with more 3D and back to 2D and back to 3D again. CDE was made when 3dish styles were more attractive.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
22. Re:That looks... by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 05:09 · Score: 1
  
  I do still use NEdit though. Fantastic regex support.
  I use NEdit pretty much every working day - it was even my main programming editor of choice for many years.
  Quiet. You will restart the vi/emacs wars.
23. Re:That looks... by Coward+Anonymous · 2012-08-06 05:28 · Score: 1
  
  I used CDE back in the day. It sucked.
24. Re:That looks... by Hallow · 2012-08-06 05:31 · Score: 1
  
  Amen to that. WindowMaker rocks(ed).
25. Re:That looks... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 05:48 · Score: 1
  
  display graphics over a network connection. This was its huge features. (and today it can be considered it biggest drawback)
  
  I don't buy your statement in parenthesis. I had trouble finding sources for this, but I have heard this from people in the know: on recent releases of Windows, RDP is very firmly ingrained on how your UI works, even when not running remotely. Yet nobody complains about that network-transparent design being slow for local apps and games.
  The fact of the matter is, the X11 design has been replicated on other platforms, and those pushing crap like DirectFB have no idea what they're talking about. There's nothing infeasible about having your UI be ultimately driven outside your process - and once you have that, why not just make your RPC mechanism network-transparent for free? To say this is somehow bad is to fundementally misunderstand software engineering.
26. Re:That looks... by jgotts · 2012-08-06 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  Are you sure about your history? I used CDE on a Dec Alpha in the mid-late 90s and the machine was beefy and fast with 24-bit color. Nobody sane would do CDE over dialup and workstations by then were moving past 8 bit color displays. I think you're thinking about the late 1980s to early 1990s. Nobody was using CDE back then. Every UNIX vendor had some proprietary window manager or a variant of mwm or twm.
  CDE looked really dated, and quite honestly I hated it. It crashed a lot. It had a lot of bloated and useless applications, and it was formal without being functional. I never used anything in that big, giant toolbox taking up 25% of the screen real estate except the [non-obvious] way to pop up a shell.
  mwm or the free fvwm with Motif and non-Motif apps is what I preferred to use. I never did get around to disabling CDE on the particular box I was using.
27. Re:That looks... by osu-neko · 2012-08-06 06:12 · Score: 1
  
  ...and like many things I loved 20 years ago, I find upon revisiting that they have lost their appeal.
  
  --
  "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
28. Re:That looks... by Drinking+Bleach · 2012-08-06 06:12 · Score: 1
  
  But they did release it via Git which makes it trivial for anyone (including you!) to simply make a github repo for it.
29. Re:That looks... by fm6 · 2012-08-06 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  Speaking as a former CDE user, I can assure you that it is horrible. I used it when I worked at Sun in in 1998, and it drove me crazy. Eventually, Sun replaced it with GNOME (branded as "Java Desktop" of all stupid names).
  From there, I went to using KDE and GNOME. The change was a powerful argument for the advantages of Open Source development as opposed to the committee-based design model used to create CDE. Not that KDE and GNOME didn't have their problems (and still do) but they showed creativity, coherence, and an ongoing desire to make the product better — all missing from CDE.
30. Re:That looks... by osu-neko · 2012-08-06 06:24 · Score: 1
  
  I'm sure about his history. I was using CDE back during that time. My SPARCstation definitely had an 8-bit color display. It sounds like you didn't start using it until some of us had been using it for years. I never saw CDE in 24-bit color, I had moved on by the time that became anything under than uber-rare and extraordinarily expensive.
  
  --
  "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
31. Re:That looks... by Guy+Harris · 2012-08-06 06:56 · Score: 1
  
  They opensourced Open Look a long time ago.
  OPEN LOOK or however it was capitalized was just a look and feel specification.
  Sun open-sourced XView, a/k/a "SunView atop X11 rather than atop SunWindows", ages ago; I don't know whether AT&T ever open source OLIT, the Xt-based widget set that also implemented the OPEN LOOK specification. I don't know whether NeWS or The NeWS Toolkit were open-sourced.
  I don't remember whether there were multiple window managers for OPEN LOOK; Sun did, as far as I know, open-source olwm.
  I'm not sure whether any of the desktop environment applications for any OPEN LOOK implementations were open-sourced.
32. Re:That looks... by Guy+Harris · 2012-08-06 07:07 · Score: 1
  
  At the time, it was the prettiest of all. I mean it was so much better than XT or Athena.
  If by "XT" you mean "Xt", it had no look-and-feel; it wasn't a toolkit, the "t" in "Xt" standing for "toolkit" nonwithstanding. The full title is "X Toolkit Intrinsics", or just "the Intrinsics", as per the documentation; as the documentation says:
  
  The Intrinsics are a programming library tailored to the special requirements of user interface construction within a network window system, specifically the X Window System. The Intrinsics and a widget set make up an X Toolkit.
  The Athena Widgets were a widget set using the Xt Intrinsics; I'm not sure looking even remotely pretty was a goal of that widget set.
  Motif was also implemented as a widget set atop the Xt Intrinsics (and there was an OPEN LOOK widget set, OLIT, as well, in addition to Sun's XView port-and-OPEN LOOKification of SunView atop Xlib).
33. Re:That looks... by aepurniet · 2012-08-06 07:09 · Score: 2
  
  At least the Application Manager doesnt take up the whole screen. What i wouldnt give for that in windows 8.
34. Re:That looks... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 07:22 · Score: 1
  
  CDE actually looks good today standard, actually very usable.
  But it isn't full of bling bling like Windows 7 and Windows 8 so people hate it....
35. Re:That looks... by jamstar7 · 2012-08-06 07:42 · Score: 1
  
  OPENSTEP wasn't 'openned up' til '94. Before then, it was actually commercial software. NeXTStep wasn't available for anything other than a NeXT.
  
  I do remember AfterStep, which wasn't too awful bad in the 1.x versions, but the new version? It evolved away from something I liked, and I never bothered to learn how to configure it 'right'.
  
  --
  Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
36. Re:That looks... by wed128 · 2012-08-06 07:53 · Score: 1
  
  That joke made more sense 15 years ago; emacs is far from the bloatiest thing running on my machine...
37. Re:That looks... by IntlHarvester · 2012-08-06 07:54 · Score: 1
  
  CUA was an IBM/Microsoft thing, so you really are splitting hairs. But I guess to be technically correct, Motif claimed to be based on OS/2 Presentation Manager 1.x, which looked pretty similar to Windows 3.1.
  The conspiracy theorist in me believes the Unix vendors wanted Microsoft to design the look&feel to avoid being sued by Apple. (MS had a licence from Apple for GUI technology, and had already beaten them in court.)
  
  --
  Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
38. Re:That looks... by jellomizer · 2012-08-06 08:31 · Score: 1
  
  I am not saying it is bad. However there are design trade offs in the environment that are no longer needed as much. In terms of performance I find that RDP work much faster then X11... However on a slower network connection X11 is much better.
  Locally you have tricks to keep speed up to par with other type of systems, that isn't as much the case, but I was trying to talk about remote performance speeds.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
39. Re:That looks... by RDW · 2012-08-06 08:59 · Score: 2
  
  Did they ever open source SunView?
  That takes me back:
  http://toastytech.com/guis/sv35.html
  Suntools (as SunView was originally known) was my first true GUI (I hadn't used a Mac or GEM and Windows 3 hadn't yet been launched). A Sun workstation running this in the 80s, complete with optical mouse and huge monitor, looked about 5 years in advance of anything else I could get time on. Now get off my lawn.
40. Re:That looks... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 09:22 · Score: 1
  
  But why should I load a web browser when all I want is a decent operating system? :D
41. Re:That looks... by inode_buddha · 2012-08-06 09:25 · Score: 2
  
  I don't imagine that you got laid much during that dark time. But yes, I, too shall be celebrating. Imagine how fast that UI will be on modern hardware! I have a spare Athlon XP with a gig of ram waiting...
  
  --
  C|N>K
42. Re:That looks... by jonadab · 2012-08-06 09:42 · Score: 1
  
  Linux users who have been around for more than a couple of years have all seen countless dozens of widget-set themes (for both Qt and GTK) specifically designed to mimic the appearance of CDE. And yes, they're kind of ugly, but sometimes people get nostalgic.
  
  If you compare the CDE look to other GUIs *from the same time period*, it doesn't seem so horrible -- which puts it leagues ahead of Xaw, for example. Xaw was visually horrible by the standards of the day when it was first introduced. I once implemented, in a single weekend, a text-mode widget set in GW-BASIC that looked about a hundred times better than Xaw. (It didn't support using a mouse, though.)
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
43. Re:That looks... by sqldr · 2012-08-06 09:42 · Score: 1
  
  CDE came out during the computer Stone Age. At that time, CDE was cutting edge
  Was it hell. I remember when our university upgraded from sunos 4 to solaris, and for about a week, my afterstep desktop wouldn't work. Other people were running enlightenment. CDE was also horrifically slow. Oooh, a calculator! It was utterly less useful than AmigaOS 3, which I was happily using at home at the time.
  
  --
  I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
44. Re:That looks... by sqldr · 2012-08-06 09:44 · Score: 1
  
  but to be blind to something like CDE is fairly unforgivable
  I'd call that an advantage. I've been trying to erase the horrible memories of running it on an underpowered sparc since 1998, and had almost completely blinded myself of it until this article. "developers are being encouraged to contribute". Here's my contribution: "rm -rf ./cde".
  
  --
  I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
45. Re:That looks... by turgid · 2012-08-06 09:53 · Score: 1
  
  KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep and XFce, to name but a few, were on the Solaris Freeware Companion CD.
  
  --
  Stick Men
46. Re:That looks... by jedidiah · 2012-08-06 09:56 · Score: 1
  
  I hated CDE even back when Windows 3.1 was the current thing. I am sure I am not alone in that regard.
  A "need for bling" has nothing to do with our aversion for CDE.
  It sorely needed to be replaced (and it was).
  The fact that it was closed source payware also did not help.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
47. Re:That looks... by sgent · 2012-08-06 10:17 · Score: 1
  
  Not quite true.
  NeXTStep was issued in an i386 form for a few years -- I know I bought a copy circa 93-94 so I could run Mathematica.
48. Re:That looks... by david.given · 2012-08-06 10:36 · Score: 1
  
  I get nostalgic for Open Look, to be honest. I think it's spare clarity holds up very well today, bitmap fonts notwithstanding, and then a true vector version would work nicely on a modern high-res display.
  The thing I really regret, though, is NeWS: platform-independent display postscript with true client side processing. Your UI runs on the display server and the application backend on the app server! Alas, it was always too proprietary to succeed. Had the opened it up, it could well have displaced X11...
49. Re:That looks... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2012-08-06 11:04 · Score: 1
  
  I'm hacking the "damage" code to enable transparency for Motif widgets. ;-)
  Of course, I still have to catch up to the guy who's cloning the SGI IRIX Magic Desktop and 4Dwm...
  
  --
  "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
  Never been known to fail..."
50. Re:That looks... by Darinbob · 2012-08-06 11:39 · Score: 1
  
  It didn't look too horrible at the time though. At the time it was a bit goofy but overall it was considered a bit too conservative and corporate, ie, bland. But so much of the time built on CDE and Motif widgets.
  There was Sun's desktop system (suntools) which started off great until they did the big changeover to OpenWindows (I thought the NeWS system was a decent enough idea and implementation with a lot of advantages over X, but the look and feel of OpenWindows was a bit weird to me).
51. Re:That looks... by Darinbob · 2012-08-06 11:55 · Score: 1
  
  I used CDE based system on HP/UX and a few other unix at the time as Windows NT when it still had the windows 3.x UI style, and the CDE was definitely a lot nicer to use. Things flipped once Windows NT (4?) adopted the Windows 95 style.
  The ideas in CDE weren't too bad. A fat toolkit bar on the bottom with folders was somewhat nifty. The actual look of the widgets left a lot to be desired but functionally it did what you wanted pretty well. Many other X systems before it didn't really have a desktop metaphor and lacked a lot of ease-of-use features. A lot of different systems experimented with UI design and how they should look, but on X Windows the default was typically a reliance on the knowledgeable end user to either start programs up from xterm or to configure the window manager to have convenient shortcuts. CDE was one of the first X Windows based ideas to try and make things easy to use for the non-techie, and was more than just a window manager.
  Windows 95 may look old today but the core concepts and methods of using it are very similar to even Windows 7. The look may be different but the way of doing things in Windows is mostly the same, and an idea copied in later windowing systems like KDE.
52. Re:That looks... by rjames13 · 2012-08-06 11:59 · Score: 1
  
  It looks fine for an 80's desktop. Pity it was released in the 90's.
53. Re:That looks... by Darinbob · 2012-08-06 12:00 · Score: 1
  
  That's Motif though. CDE was the desktop environment, and Motif was the widget set. It was one of the first things I used that had a toolbar/toolbox at the bottom of the screen, something that's very common today.
  It also came along in the era of the Unix wars, where big Unix companies split up and joined factions over competing standards, and this infighting/standardization affected CDE, along with the strict licensing of closed source CDE and Motif. Motif did look pretty nice compared to Athena but it was closed up tight and a luxury to many people.
54. Re:That looks... by fm6 · 2012-08-06 12:47 · Score: 1
  
  I used what the IT department gave me. Even if I'd had root access on my Sun workstation, I didn't have time to experiment with desktops. I didn't get to that until I moved to Borland and had to create various Linux environments so I could document Kylix.
55. Re:That looks... by spauldo · 2012-08-06 13:09 · Score: 2
  
  You were on an Alpha, which probably had TGA graphics. You were one of the lucky ones.
  A lot of us poor saps were using Sparcs with 8-bit color.
  Sun seemed to think no one cared about color depth until '97 or so. They did sell a few systems with 24-bit color, but they were expensive as hell. They'd charge twenty times the price for the same features a PC user would get with a discount Trident card.
  Either way, it makes little to no difference as far as remote X displays. The only time the increased color depth affected the bandwidth was when you were viewing raster images. X over dialup was usable enough, unless you were doing graphics work.
  
  --
  Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
56. Re:That looks... by defcon-11 · 2012-08-06 14:01 · Score: 1
  
  Anyone else see the hot Motif action when JPL was showing off the first thumbnails from curiosity live on NASA TV? Pretty awesome, and brought back old memories of working with Sun workstations.
57. Re:That looks... by MichaelSmith · 2012-08-06 14:54 · Score: 1
  
  Believe me it is horrible. Plain FVWM is a thousand times better.
  
  --
  http://michaelsmith.id.au
58. Re:That looks... by MichaelSmith · 2012-08-06 15:14 · Score: 1
  
  Dunno. On dozens of accounts, on dozens of systems I have changed my DT environment from CDE to fvwm. FVWM is about ten times faster for a start.
  
  --
  http://michaelsmith.id.au
59. Re:That looks... by UltraZelda64 · 2012-08-06 18:22 · Score: 1
  
  If you really want to see an eyesore, just look up shots of Windows 1.x and 2.x and other graphical environments from the 80s.
  Really, back then, people belonged at the command line... the graphical user interfaces of the time were horrible. Of course, CDE came around in the next decade, and while not attractive, it's a lot better than what came before it.
  I'll probably be burned at the stake for this, but I honestly liked the look of Windows from Windows 95 to ME (and XP when you turn its Play-Doh theme off).
60. Re:That looks... by makomk · 2012-08-06 22:44 · Score: 1
  
  There's actually a closed-source, commercial predecessor to Wine called Wind/U that provided a way to port Windows 3.1 applications to Unix, and yes it is built on Motif. I've actually had the misfortune of using a proprietary application based on it which still hasn't been moved to anything more modern.
61. Re:That looks... by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 22:57 · Score: 1
  
  I guess you've looked at the XView libraries on a 64 bit PC. XView was created by Sun as a way of easing the transition from SunView (their proprietary windowing system) to the X Window System, and the code was later open sourced. 64 bit versions of the libraries wont run on amd64 / x86_64, despite being included in places like the Debian repositories. This is due to an assumption in the XView code about the size of data types - an assumption that doesn't hold for the 64 bit Intel world (details here). You may be able to get a 32 bit copy of the libraries running in compatability on a 64 bit version of Linux.
62. Re:That looks... by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 23:26 · Score: 1
  
  Sun seemed to think no one cared about color depth until '97 or so. They did sell a few systems with 24-bit color, but they were expensive as hell.
  Yup. most Sun systems like my SparcStation 5 shipped with 8 bit framebuffers that caused the screen to flash horribly if you switched between the windows of applications that were using different palettes. I eventually upgraded to a 24 bit LX framebuffer, which set me back an eye watering £575 in 1998.
63. Re:That looks... by wed128 · 2012-08-07 00:40 · Score: 1
  
  That's funny...firefox was EXACTLY what i was thinking of...
64. Re:That looks... by cthulhu11 · 2012-08-07 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  Thank you for making one of the few posts in this thread with a clue. I especially love the one referring to fvwm as a "GUI".
65. Re:That looks... by David+Gerard · 2012-08-10 21:21 · Score: 1
  
  I worked for an oil company from 2002-2004, supporting scientists (geologists and petrophysicists) using Sun boxes to run shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty proprietary vertical-market software. All on CDE. Everyone got an NT box on their desk too. NT was way more usable for actual work, but I had to use CDE so the awful software would break on my Sun box much the way it broke on the users' Sun boxes. Horrible. Horrible.
  
  --
  http://rocknerd.co.uk
66. Re:That looks... by unixisc · 2012-08-13 23:55 · Score: 1
  
  KDE allows one to adapt an OpenLook theme
67. Re:That looks... by unixisc · 2012-08-14 00:04 · Score: 1
  
  It would be wonderful if OS/2 were to be open sourced. OTOH, there is an OS called OSFree, which attempts to put Presentation Manager and other OS/2 utilities on an L4 microkernel. Once it's ready, it can be targetted for any platform.
AH AH AH AH by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 02:47 · Score: 1, Insightful

AH! Ah! Ah! Ah!
CDE open sourced now ?
Nowadays it is only of interest to historians.
1. Re:AH AH AH AH by Ginger+Unicorn · 2012-08-06 02:48 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Is that the Count from sesame street having an orgasm?
  
  --
  (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
2. Re:AH AH AH AH by jockm · 2012-08-06 02:53 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  And people who have legacy apps who use Motif. This is a good move for those, and the people who need to support them.
  And Historians, don't discount that. Engineers have short memories and we are loosing important artifacts all the time...
  
  --
  
  What do you know I wrote a novel
3. Re:AH AH AH AH by ILongForDarkness · 2012-08-06 03:07 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
4. Re:AH AH AH AH by hjf · 2012-08-06 03:09 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  1. Create ugly environment
  2. ???
  3. Profit
  4. Become irrelevant
  5. Open source it
5. Re:AH AH AH AH by Art+Challenor · 2012-08-06 03:12 · Score: 1
  
  Engineers have short memories and we are loosing important artifacts all the time...
  I'm sure there's a comment about the primary use of the Internet lurking in there somewhere, but I can't remember what it is.
6. Re:AH AH AH AH by segedunum · 2012-08-06 03:16 · Score: 1
  
  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).
  That's why CDE is being open sourced now. It's just a means for the Unix vendors to keep these expensive applications going. They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
7. Re:AH AH AH AH by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 03:17 · Score: 1
  
  Obligatory video. NSFW (lol)
8. Re:AH AH AH AH by serialband · 2012-08-06 03:32 · Score: 1
  
  Engineers have short memories and we are loosing important artifacts all the time...
  If they were setting them loose, then we wouldn't be losing them.
9. Re:AH AH AH AH by AchilleTalon · 2012-08-06 04:00 · Score: 1
  
  Don't you meant paleontologists?
  
  --
  Achille Talon
  Hop!
10. Re:AH AH AH AH by AchilleTalon · 2012-08-06 04:11 · Score: 1
  
  Well, if you don't change anything by fear of introducing a bug. Where is the need for CDE to become open since you won't even change the code using it? I believe the thing is only legal. The providers are just trying to throw this monster away from them because they need to provide, on paper, some kind of support for it for a period of time that extend beyond the actual life of the thing for a very narrow range of customers.
  I remember that IBM was obligate to support AIX 1.2 on its PS/2 workstations for at least 25 years because they won a contract for the US aerial control system (I don't remember exactly the name, I am not living in USA). So, even if nobody no longer is having a PS/2 and AIX PS/2 never got a significant market share, there was eventually a 1.3 version for this only purpose. So, I imagine freeing the source code is a way to handle this kind of situations these days.
  
  --
  Achille Talon
  Hop!
11. Re:AH AH AH AH by RabidReindeer · 2012-08-06 04:19 · Score: 1
  
  We only loose them if they were tighter than specification to begin with.
  (Seriously, why is the lose/loose typo so damned common here? I see it more than mixing up its/it's or there/their/they're.)
  Well, its because if you give people free reign, they loose their lose change.
12. Re:AH AH AH AH by ILongForDarkness · 2012-08-06 04:27 · Score: 1
  
  I think you are right on there. Open sourcing things sometimes is just a matter of saying "hey we don't want to be responsible for this anymore it's been ~20 years now it is your turn". Supporting something that has little in the way of generating new press releases with shinny new toys that draw new revenue is just a cost centre.
13. Re:AH AH AH AH by bsDaemon · 2012-08-06 04:38 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I don't know. It seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to Gnome3 or Unity.
14. Re:AH AH AH AH by jockm · 2012-08-06 04:48 · Score: 1
  
  Well in my case it is because I am dyslexic, and despite four and a half decades of teaching myself tricks and compensation techniques, some things just fall thought.
  But, you know, thanks for pointing that out...
  
  --
  
  What do you know I wrote a novel
15. Re:AH AH AH AH by cheesybagel · 2012-08-06 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  Motif was open sourced a long time ago already as Open Motif.
16. Re:AH AH AH AH by jockm · 2012-08-06 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  Yes I made a typo, and if /. let me edit a post I would. But that being said, it was also clear from context.
  
  --
  
  What do you know I wrote a novel
17. Re:AH AH AH AH by jockm · 2012-08-06 04:51 · Score: 1
  
  Yes for the love of god I made a typo, one that lots of people make all the time. Good for you.
  
  --
  
  What do you know I wrote a novel
18. Re:AH AH AH AH by fm6 · 2012-08-06 06:24 · Score: 1
  
  That's why they open-sourced it. Last chance to keep it from dying.
19. Re:AH AH AH AH by osu-neko · 2012-08-06 06:29 · Score: 2
  
  OpenMotif has a "more liberal" license than Motif, but it's still proprietary.
  
  --
  "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
20. Re:AH AH AH AH by Grishnakh · 2012-08-06 06:29 · Score: 1
  
  Yes I made a typo, and if /. let me edit a post I would.
  This is an excellent point here. Why doesn't Slashdot allow you to edit posts anyway? Reddit does. Slashdot's UI is so inferior to Reddit's it's not even funny.
21. Re:AH AH AH AH by turgid · 2012-08-06 09:39 · Score: 1
  
  They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
  Correct. CDE was/is the "Standard" UNIX/Open Systems desktop environment and vendors were required to have an implementation on their OS in order to compete for various contracts (mainly US government) that mandated it.
  As such, it was ugly, barely usable and stagnant. Nobody liked it. It implemented a standardised set of behaviours and looks in order to make all vendors' systems looks and feel the same.
  There was no motivation or incentive to improve it. For one vendor to make a change, the would have to get the others to agree to changing the standard, and for all the others to implement the new changes...
  
  --
  Stick Men
22. Re:AH AH AH AH by jockm · 2012-08-06 09:41 · Score: 1
  
  Only one who has so far ;)
  
  --
  
  What do you know I wrote a novel
23. Re:AH AH AH AH by evilviper · 2012-08-07 09:29 · Score: 1
  
  And people who have legacy apps who use Motif. This is a good move for those, and the people who need to support them.
  "Legacy apps"!?! Hey bud, XPDF switched from gtk+, TO MOTIF a few years back. XPDF is hardly a legacy app, and the developer believed that Motif was the superior toolkit, entirely despite the licensing issue.
  
  --
  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
small missing bit of information by Trepidity · 2012-08-06 02:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

"CDE was created by a collaboration of Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, Fujitsu and Hitachi" in 1993. It's interesting historically, but even commercial Unices have phased it out. Sun dumped it from Solaris ten years ago.
Open-sourcing Motif at least makes it easier to maintain some legacy apps, though sucks for the LessTif guys that they put so much work into cloning it that could've been avoided if Motif had been open-sourced years ago.

--
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
1. Re:small missing bit of information by pscottdv · 2012-08-06 02:53 · Score: 1
  
  Sun dumped it from Solaris ten years ago.
  I was just going to say that they're only about 10 years too late!
  
  --
  this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
2. Re:small missing bit of information by Eravnrekaree · 2012-08-06 04:19 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  You could use CDE today, Why not? It uses a fraction of the memory and is still completely functional. The age of something has no impact on its usefulness. If someone likes to use CDE, it doesnt matter how old it is. Many people like CDEs modern solid coloured graphics over the nuasiating aqua themes and memory hogging 3d nonsense. It is often the case that newer software is worse. Back when CDE was written, programmers were much more careful since they had to be to make something that was memory efficient. Nowadays everyone is sloppy and lazy today leading to buggy memory wasting software.
3. Re:small missing bit of information by Gordonjcp · 2012-08-06 04:32 · Score: 2
  
  You'd have to completely rewrite it from scratch, possibly using something like Cairo, for it to work at a tolerable speed on modern hardware. CDE expects everything to be a flat unaccelerated bitplane. It's slow as hell.
4. Re:small missing bit of information by Desler · 2012-08-06 04:40 · Score: 1
  
  Back when CDE was written, programmers were much more careful since they had to be to make something that was memory efficient. Nowadays everyone is sloppy and lazy today leading to buggy memory wasting software
  And back in the days of CDE people were saying the same thing about contemporary software in comparison to the 80s. It was of course as false then as your statement is now. There was plenty of 'bloated' and buggy software in the age of CDE. You're blinded by nostalgia.
5. Re:small missing bit of information by jgotts · 2012-08-06 06:04 · Score: 1
  
  Nope, I used CDE on a DEC Alpha and it crashed a lot. I barely used any of CDE, either. Mainly it was bringing up a shell to run non-CDE apps. The environment was ugly and unstable. I preferred fvwm, but never installed it on the machine.
6. Re:small missing bit of information by jrumney · 2012-08-06 12:43 · Score: 1
  
  You'd have to completely rewrite it from scratch, possibly using something like Cairo, for it to work at a tolerable speed on modern hardware. CDE expects everything to be a flat unaccelerated bitplane. It's slow as hell.
  Are you suggesting that modern hardware is slower than hardware of 19 years ago at rendering flat unaccelerated bitplanes?
7. Re:small missing bit of information by Gordonjcp · 2012-08-06 18:27 · Score: 1
  
  It's not *much* quicker, and it's certainly a lot slower than using hardware-accelerated primitives. This is why LessTif is so slow compared to (for example) Gtk.
15 years too late. by iguana · 2012-08-06 02:51 · Score: 3, Informative

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.
1. Re:15 years too late. by noldrin · 2012-08-06 04:05 · Score: 1
  
  I heavily used the Motif Window Manager in 96 and 97 when I was using Digital Unix. It was a nice improvement from TWM. I would have liked it on Linux, but FVWM was good enough. I doubt this will get me to switch back.
2. Re:15 years too late. by DdJ · 2012-08-06 04:13 · Score: 1
  
  Historical interest is worthwhile.
  Plus, this allows the possibility of open-sourcing additional software that was built on top of this stuff back in the day. In the late 80s and early 90s, I worked on library automation software, and the Unix version of it was built on top of the libraries that were part of CDE. That code can in theory now be dusted off and released.
3. Re:15 years too late. by Eravnrekaree · 2012-08-06 04:21 · Score: 2
  
  You are wrong. Many people would like to use CDE because onlike modern stuff it does not use a lot of memory. Everything old is new again. CDE works fine and there is no reason someone could not use it.
4. Re:15 years too late. by jones_supa · 2012-08-06 04:45 · Score: 2
  
  Open Sourcing CDE? Seriously? Would have possibly made a difference in 1998. But now? Except for historical interest, there's no point.
  I see the historical interest exactly as the main point here. Source code releases are an excellent addition to preserving the history of computers and software.
5. Re:15 years too late. by Jonner · 2012-08-06 06:31 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  Unfortunately, some companies only see Open Source as a way to gain good will or prestige by releasing code that's no longer of value to them. It's better than nothing, but it's entirely missing the main goals of both the Free Software and Open Source movements.
6. Re:15 years too late. by jonadab · 2012-08-06 09:59 · Score: 1
  
  > Would have possibly made a difference in 1998
  
  If CDE had been open-sourced in early or even mid 1997, then the history of the open-source desktop would indeed be different. In 1998? Maybe. Depending on *when* in 1998 it happened. By the end of 1998, it wouldn't have mattered at all, because both Gnome and KDE were mature, feature complete, clearly superior to CDE, and included in multiple distributions by that point.
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by tepples · 2012-08-06 02:51 · Score: 1

CDE is now distributed under the LGPL. So is LessTif. But as I lack the time to download and evaluate both, are there any v2 vs. v3 blockers that would get in the way of a merger between the projects?
1. Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 03:30 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  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.
2. Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by drinkypoo · 2012-08-06 04:24 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  CDE would run kind of OK on pretty old machines, so maybe it will enjoy a renaissance. But probably not.
  Motif being released for free is way more exciting than CDE. I actually paid for CND back in the day to get a Motif license...
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
3. Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by fm6 · 2012-08-06 06:31 · Score: 1
  
  Trust me, you shouldn't waste your time evaluating CDE. Not with a gazillion Linux desktops under active development — as opposed to legacy software that's going OS because its creators can't be bothered to maintain it.
4. Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by Patch86 · 2012-08-06 06:59 · Score: 1
  
  There are already plenty of desktop environments for low end hardware, such as XFCE, LXDE and god knows how many others. It doesn't sound like CDE (still) has anything to offer above the competition.
  This sounds like a case of open-sourcing abandonware so as not to leave the remaining users high and dry (particularly important here as the existing CDE users will all be industrial equipment users who have paid millions for their systems). Better than letting the code sink into a blackhole, but hardly much for most of us to get excited about.
  It's just a shame CDE wasn't open-sourced back when it was still relevant. If it had, it would probably still be relevant today; there wouldn't have been a KDE or XFCE if CDE had been open, and it's feasible that it could have gone on to grab a significant chunk of the Linux, BSD and Unix market and held onto it to this day.
5. Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 23:33 · Score: 1
  
  I actually paid for CND back in the day to get a Motif license...
  I bought a CD-ROM of Motif 2.0 from RedHat way back in 1996 - I think it was the only thing they sold that didn't come with source code. When I recently moved house I found the CD-ROM, along with another disc containing a compilation of XView stuff that Ian Darwin used to sell.
6. Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? by David+Gerard · 2012-08-10 22:02 · Score: 1
  
  It was actually open sourced because fans - there is actually such a thing as a CDE fan - nagged and nagged and nagged the Open Group for years to open source it and push the paperwork through.
  And now the mailing list is hugely active and a bunch of enthusiastic and colourblind nostalgists is hard at work on porting this turd to everything in sight. I'm sure OpenBSD will be just fabulous in CDE.
  
  --
  http://rocknerd.co.uk
Xtreme Kool Letterz by tepples · 2012-08-06 02:52 · Score: 1

So what does that make KDE Plasma Desktop? The Kommunist Desktop Environment?
Oh good. by Jethro · 2012-08-06 02:53 · Score: 2

Wow. CDE is one of those things that... yeah, it was better than the nothing or the OpenWindows we had before it... kinda... but has there been anything done with it that's in any way an improvement to anything going on today? Or in the past decade?
Same with MOTIF. It used to be the only game in town, but we have stuff like gtk and qt now. Are these things even relevant anymore?

--

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
1. Re:Oh good. by FranTaylor · 2012-08-06 04:15 · Score: 1
  
  Are these things even relevant anymore?
  Motif was modernized to use the new X font mechanism while maintaining compatibility.
  There are other relatively minor steps that can be taken that will dramatically improve the visual experience.
  The compelling advantage of this, is a code base that runs well on 30 MHz SPARC machines of 1993. Just imagine how snappy it would run on a Raspberry Pi.
2. Re:Oh good. by Eravnrekaree · 2012-08-06 04:23 · Score: 2
  
  The fact it is not GTK and not modern desktops loaded down with hundreds of megabytes of graphics is its appeal. I think people want to use it becasue it is not modern and that it does things the old way, like, not using 100s of megabytes. Not everyone wants to spend tons of memory on some poorly written Gnome UI so they can have some ugly looking graphics.
3. Re:Oh good. by Desler · 2012-08-06 04:46 · Score: 1
  
  You realize it's no longer 1990 and even a 1 gig stick of ancient DDR-333 RAM is only 25 bucks, right?
4. Re:Oh good. by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 05:03 · Score: 1
  
  So use XFCE, Fluxbox, or one of the other lightweight windows managers.
5. Re:Oh good. by geminidomino · 2012-08-06 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  You do realize that some people would rather use that RAM to power the applications they're working on, rather than some magpie's wet dream of a DE getting in their way, right?
6. Re:Oh good. by squiggleslash · 2012-08-06 06:44 · Score: 1
  
  I wish that were true. We used it on 300MHz (from memory, thereabouts anyway) Alpha servers, and it wasn't exactly snappy. I suspect it was doing a lot of things "the wrong way" from an X11 point of view.
  
  --
  You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah Windows 3.1 for *nix! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 02:55 · Score: 1

Welcome back to 1991 everyone! We hope you really like our old style interface on your futuristic *nix...who needs that moden look and feel anyway,
1. Re:Yeah Windows 3.1 for *nix! by Chrisq · 2012-08-06 03:00 · Score: 2
  
  Welcome back to 1991 everyone! We hope you really like our old style interface on your futuristic *nix...who needs that moden look and feel anyway,
  This is just one step. Next month they will release a raw X interface where everything has to be launched from the command line.
2. Re:Yeah Windows 3.1 for *nix! by FranTaylor · 2012-08-06 05:05 · Score: 1
  
  That would be an improvement over both Gnome 3 and Windows 8
3. Re:Yeah Windows 3.1 for *nix! by jones_supa · 2012-08-06 05:10 · Score: 1
  
  Please do, I'd love to use such an interface.
  I suppose most people here know about ratpoison already, but I encourage every modern-day UNIX geek trying it at some point.
'BOUT TIME by andydread · 2012-08-06 03:00 · Score: 1

What the hell took them so long. I remember using CDE on GenRAD test stations way back in 1994-95 and wished it would run on linux then FVWM95 came out and I never looked back
Hideous by ericcc65 · 2012-08-06 03:03 · Score: 1

The ugliest desktop I have ever used or laid my eyes on. I remember in college trying with all my might to compile, install, and run Blackbox on the computer lab HP-UX machines without root just to avoid the hideousness of CDE. I'm sure it was fine when it came out but I don't see the point to this now.

Incidentally, does anyone remember when XFCE came out I thought it was initially billed as an open source version of CDE. Of course it's gotten much better and is actually my primary desktop. I might be misremembering that though.
1. Re:Hideous by jimbo · 2012-08-06 08:44 · Score: 1
  
  That brings me back. My first HP-UX ran Twm. I spent much time trying to install other cooler environments on my account until I finally realized that Twm was just fine.
  Ever since that I've never had problems adapting to anything; OS/2, win 3/95/XP/7, KDE, OS X, iOS, Android, etc. I'm fine with them all.
2. Re:Hideous by jonadab · 2012-08-06 10:02 · Score: 1
  
  > The ugliest desktop I have ever used or laid my eyes on.'
  
  Apparently you have not seen Xaw. Compared to that, CDE is drop-dead gorgeous.
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
3. Re:Hideous by spauldo · 2012-08-06 13:30 · Score: 1
  
  Anyone who used CDE and compiled other window managers would have been intimately familiar with Xaw. There were a lot of utilities that used it. While they might not have been in the default menus for a particular brand of Unix, they were there with the rest of the X stuff.
  I miss Xaw. I started writing a battery meter in it a few months ago but got sidetracked*. Back before GTK+ and QT, Linux users used Xaw and tk apps for pretty much everything. I even used to use an Xaw web browser (chimera). Netscape was, of course, Motif-based.
  * Frikkin' Lenovo removed the battery LED on the Thinkpad, so now I know my laptop became accidentally unplugged when it shuts itself off. There's no battery app that I liked that would swallow into FvwmButtons.
  
  --
  Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
15 again by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 03:04 · Score: 2, Funny

Ah, to be 15 again.
(You have no clue what CDE is or what era it comes from, do you?)
1. Re:15 again by segedunum · 2012-08-06 03:13 · Score: 1
  
  He doesn't need to. I know where it comes from and even used it and it still looks like crap.
2. Re:15 again by IntlHarvester · 2012-08-06 03:42 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yep, that pastel color scheme may have looked really high-tech during the Reagan administration, but even by the mid-1990s it was seemed like a museum piece.
  However it's too bad the source code wasn't released back in the 1990s, people could have modernized the look and possibly avoided much of the KDE versus Gnome nonsense.
  
  --
  Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
3. Re:15 again by cupantae · 2012-08-06 09:29 · Score: 1
  
  And CDE 4.0 still probably would have enraged us.
  
  --
  --
Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 03:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
XFCE (was Re:Hideous) by dskoll · 2012-08-06 03:07 · Score: 1

Yes, XFCE initially looked very CDE-like. In fact, that's why I started using it: I was using CDE on Solaris at work and wanted a similar desktop at home so I wouldn't have to make the mental switch between desktops.
XFCE evolved and (as you say) kept getting better, so I kept it as my desktop.
Does anyone still use CDE? by overshoot · 2012-08-06 03:09 · Score: 2

I think the last system I saw with CDE on it was a Sun desktop about ten years ago. Since the same machine also had KDE installed, I CDE might have been removed at some point and I wouldn't have known.

--
Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
1. Re:Does anyone still use CDE? by disi · 2012-08-06 03:21 · Score: 1
  
  HP-UX CAD workstations use it, last seen ~3 years ago...
Full Circle by segedunum · 2012-08-06 03:10 · Score: 1

So, I take it we've come full circle with Unix desktops and we're right back to where we started? I can only ask myself why this has happened after all this time and inactivity and I can only think that CDE is making a comeback amongst all the ex-CDEers. They just want some basic crap they can pass off a a graphical environment.
1. Re:Full Circle by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 04:49 · Score: 2
  
  CDE is not making a comeback. It was open sourced because it has no commercial value.
  Install XFCE if you want something lightweight, nothing to see here.
Re:Nice by segedunum · 2012-08-06 03:19 · Score: 1

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.
This is not just being done by an 'external volunteer' and there is nothing historical about it, I can assure you. A lot of insanely expensive applications still run on a CDE/Motif environment and I can only see this as a way of maintaining the status quo on Unix platforms. We still haven't got out of the 80s/90s.
CDE? Ewww... by ilsaloving · 2012-08-06 03:21 · Score: 1

I remember having that as the default desktop when I first got my account at university. One of the first things I did was replace it with something else because it was so frustrating.
At least now that it's open source, someone may find some small gem of code in the base that is genuinely useful and can be ported to another project.
Hooray! More life for old systems! And new! by emil · 2012-08-06 03:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

In its time, CDE was a reasonably fast desktop environment on a 75 MHz processor. CDE and Dillo would be great for the DSL/Puppy crowd.
CDE also includes a Korn shell ('93 version) that Novell hacked with Motif extensions. Everybody should start bundling that, assuming that the licensing is reasonable. It would be a great addition to pdksh, and is hands-down better than bash.
1. Re:Hooray! More life for old systems! And new! by evilviper · 2012-08-06 16:41 · Score: 1
  
  CDE and Dillo would be great for the DSL/Puppy crowd.
  Why bother? XFce v3.x was a much-improved CDE panel clone that was much easier to configure and use.
  
  It would be a great addition to pdksh, and is hands-down better than bash.
  pdksh isn't used for anything... OpenBSD's enhanced version (better than bash) has been repackaged as "mksh". I'd be happy if we just started seeing mksh everywhere, rather than clunky old pdsh still hanging around for some reason.
  
  --
  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I used it by blind+biker · 2012-08-06 03:23 · Score: 1

I used it, as "early" as 2003, on HP-UX. Not sure what happened to HP-UX after that, our projects switched mostly to Solaris, which also had CDE but soon switched to Gnome.

--
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB by tstrunk · 2012-08-06 03:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

So many negative posts here. So let me be the first to say: Good job!
It's very good they open source it, even if only for legacy apps (Motif). The open-source code base for CDE is also nice to have in Patent lawsuits for prior art mining. It's nice they went out of their way to clear the legal issues, now that no money can be made anymore with either.
So thanks to the Open Group!
1. Re:Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB by Desler · 2012-08-06 03:34 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB by JosefSit · 2012-08-06 05:34 · Score: 1
  
  +1 to your post. I'm so happy to have some mod points left for your post! I can only add: Yes, so it is legacy. It is ugly looking. It is useless for most people. I, myself can't use it in any way. BUUUT: It is a good thing to see legacies being released into public "possession". It's a little bit like Ford releases one of it's old plans for the original mobiles: nobody would drive such a car today, but it is history. History accessible by EVERYBODY...
3. Re:Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB by Desler · 2012-08-06 06:57 · Score: 1
  
  CDE was - as I remember it - cutting edge sometime 1988 when it pretty much blew away everything else.
  I'm sure the time machine needed to get CDE 5 years before its existence blew people away even more.
Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 03:46 · Score: 1, Informative

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 by christurkel · 2012-08-06 03:47 · Score: 5, Informative

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

--

CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
1. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-06 03:51 · Score: 1
  
  Is there any possibility of getting the full commit history or is that information just not available? It would be interesting from a historical perspective to see the evolution.
2. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by christurkel · 2012-08-06 03:55 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think so but I can ask,
  
  --
  
  CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
3. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 04:04 · Score: 1
  
  Hi Chris, Thanks for the information. Do you know if The Open Group continued to work on the Motif code after it was partially open sourced as OpenMotif? In other words, are their likely to be changes in The Open Group code that aren't in the 2.3.3 version of OpenMotif that ICS maintain? I assume that The Open Group provided a reference implementation of Motif and CDE to companies like Sun and HP, and that these companies then made their own modifications as they ported it to operating systems like Solaris and HP-UX. Presumably theses changes would have been fed back and assigned to The Open Group, so only minor differences are likely to exist between the current reference implementation and those that were distributed in binary form by the Unix vendors themselves.
4. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by FranTaylor · 2012-08-06 04:11 · Score: 1
  
  I know Motif has modern font support, but is there any roadmap for support of modern rendering? The look could be much more modern and stylish without breaking APIs...
5. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by christurkel · 2012-08-06 04:16 · Score: 1
  
  I am not aware of any changes to Motif that wasn't released in OpenMotif. CDE is a different story and it's highly unlikely the Open Group got any vendor specific changes back.
  
  --
  
  CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
6. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by christurkel · 2012-08-06 04:17 · Score: 1
  
  There is experimental support for more modern font rendering here: https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/FontsWithXFT/
  
  --
  
  CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
7. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by grantingram · 2012-08-06 04:26 · Score: 1
  
  Congratulations on the release. I actually remember CDE with some fondness, the future may be bright but the past definately had a biege or an off-vomit purple tint to it....
8. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by FranTaylor · 2012-08-06 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  What about support for "eye-candy" type visual effects that can only be done with cairo-style rendering?
  Back then it was too heavy on the graphics, but today's GPUs handle this stuff in stride, and the user interface is more responsive and more intuitive as a result.
9. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by christurkel · 2012-08-06 06:38 · Score: 1
  
  Patches encouraged! Join us on #cde on Freenode. FreeBSD is our biggest request and the one we have fewest developers for (exactly one at the moment).
  
  --
  
  CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
10. Re:Submitter/Documentation Lead by christurkel · 2012-08-06 09:43 · Score: 1
  
  I have no idea. Someone had CDE working with xcompmgr a few weeks ago.
  
  --
  
  CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Better than GNOME 3 by Alex+Belits · 2012-08-06 03:52 · Score: 5, Funny

I really hate to say it, but CDE, the clunkiest desktop environment in the history of computing, is still better than GNOME 3.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
1. Re:Better than GNOME 3 by Alex+Belits · 2012-08-06 21:06 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, I do, as I would rather prefer not to have to go through switching to running Compiz with other environments, what is now painful in all of them, and was very easy under GNOME 2.
  What brings a question, how would CDE look with Compiz instead of Motif Window Manager (and would my eyes bleed from such a sight)?
  
  --
  Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
2. Re:Better than GNOME 3 by Alex+Belits · 2012-08-07 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  You have never seen Compiz right?
  
  --
  Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Ah nostalgia by akerasi · 2012-08-06 03:55 · Score: 1

CDE was the desktop enviro on the Sun workstations I used in college. I may have to download it and use it just for nostalgia's sake... and, that sort of thing is probably the only useful thing about this release.
1. Re:Ah nostalgia by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 04:42 · Score: 1
  
  CDE was the desktop enviro on the Sun workstations I used in college. I may have to download it and use it just for nostalgia's sake... and, that sort of thing is probably the only useful thing about this release.
  What was it? Solaris 9 when they started giving people the choice of CDE or GNOME. GNOME was a lot better and everyone dumped CDE.
  CDE was a limited and annoying window manager, but it was better than no window manager which is the only reason people used it.
2. Re:Ah nostalgia by FranTaylor · 2012-08-06 05:00 · Score: 1
  
  It's still there in Solaris 10
  Some old Sun apps still don't work right in GNOME, you have to boot up CDE for them.
  CDE is no more or less annoying than any other window manager if you go in and tweak it to do what you want.
3. Re:Ah nostalgia by akerasi · 2012-08-06 06:25 · Score: 1
  
  CDE was the desktop enviro on the Sun workstations I used in college. I may have to download it and use it just for nostalgia's sake... and, that sort of thing is probably the only useful thing about this release.
  What was it? Solaris 9 when they started giving people the choice of CDE or GNOME. GNOME was a lot better and everyone dumped CDE.
  CDE was a limited and annoying window manager, but it was better than no window manager which is the only reason people used it.
  I believe it was Solaris 8, but that we transitioned to 9 by the end of my college days. Honestly, I don't remember for sure, though.
DSL/Puppy crowd??? by logicassasin · 2012-08-06 04:01 · Score: 1

I've been running customized DSL implementations on my older PC's as well as the odd Puppy VM for a while now and JWM is quite fine for these mini distros (as is Flux/OpenBox which both include).

--
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Wow, only 15 years too late to matter at all by aussersterne · 2012-08-06 04:02 · Score: 1

(if we are generous about things).
I would have killed for CDE on Linux in 1996. But now?
What could possibly be the point? And Motif next? Seriously?

--
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
1. Re:Wow, only 15 years too late to matter at all by kthreadd · 2012-08-06 10:46 · Score: 1
  
  It doesn't hurt anyone. If you don't want it, don't use it.
  I for one seriously considers switching back to it.
Wow by StefanWiesendanger · 2012-08-06 04:05 · Score: 2

Woohoo, this is great news! Ah wait... it's 2012, not 1999...
It's like stepping back into 1997 by thetoadwarrior · 2012-08-06 04:14 · Score: 1

Complete with being hosted on source forge. They should have done this a long time ago.
What about releasing OSF1? by Al+Kossow · 2012-08-06 04:19 · Score: 1

OSF1 and DCE would be of more interest than CDE/Motif at this point.
1. Re:What about releasing OSF1? by LizardKing · 2012-08-06 04:35 · Score: 1
  
  I seem to recall that DCE was open sourced a few years back. Not sure how relevant it would be today, since there are plenty of excellent open source alternatives out there now.
2. Re:What about releasing OSF1? by FranTaylor · 2012-08-06 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  OSF1 is still a a money-making product for HP, they call it "Tru64" now.
Re:Nice by Eravnrekaree · 2012-08-06 04:26 · Score: 1

Wrong. Not everyone likes your ugly aqua UIs which gobble up 100s of megabytes. Actually CDEs user interface has a clearnnes which many like, in fact many like me prefer it because it does not look like modern UIs and prefer its appearance. You seem to think that if you don't like something that no one else could like it either, what an arrogant and idiotic way of thinking that everyone has the same preferences as you.
Wonderful by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 04:36 · Score: 1

That's just wonderful. Now all we need is a time machine to take the now open source back to 10 years ago.
CDE may have been great a few years ago but in 2012 this code is obsolete. It's light years behind KDE, GNOME, and most of the lightweight windows managers.
Re:Back in the day... by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 04:38 · Score: 1

This headline would have gotten 2000 replies.
Back when the internet was 2000 people..
Now it will get 2000 replies saying they misspent 'KDE'.
Re:a little on the antiquated side by red+crab · 2012-08-06 04:42 · Score: 1

I never got to like CDE but it still was a precursor to many dekstops of today. The Mac OSX panel not only looks very much like CDE panel but is functionally too quite similar ; I neither liked the CDE panel nor the Mac's. The Solaris CDE had an additional optional panel on the left, if i can recall, and that was as ugly as the one Unity sports now. Also the square block icons of Windows 8 appear like a throwback of CDE.
Re:Novell by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 04:51 · Score: 1

GroupWise still exists?
There are still people using it?
Re:Nice by 1s44c · 2012-08-06 04:58 · Score: 1

This looks like a calculated corporate "FUCK YOU" from the big corporations to the Open Source community.
It's nothing of the sort, it's a gift not a liability. Giving this gift does not imply an obligation on the part of the receiver.
If the open source world doesn't want to use it they don't have to. As it's pretty old now I don't see any of the Linux distros being remotely interested.
Having said that it would be really funny if everyone with a redhat support contract would request this.
Re:Nice by jones_supa · 2012-08-06 05:21 · Score: 1

Mod parent up. Good information.
CDE was horrible by AaronW · 2012-08-06 06:33 · Score: 2

Back in 1999 I started working on a project using a Sun computer running CDE. It was so bad I worked on getting KDE to work on Solaris (I wrote the Solaris ARTS sound support). In the next several years I supported KDE running on Solaris and many people in my group installed KDE rather than use the horrid CDE interface.

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Great timing by MaxToTheMax · 2012-08-06 06:56 · Score: 1

This release came just in time for no one to care anymore.
Hooray ! by nukenerd · 2012-08-06 07:04 · Score: 1

I can leave the command line behind at last.
Re:Glad CDE (and soon Motif) was open sourced by christurkel · 2012-08-06 09:44 · Score: 1

They are slow, that's why. Look for the announcement here when it comes: http://blog.opengroup.org/

--

CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Thank you by INowRegretThesePosts · 2012-08-06 10:00 · Score: 1

Just wanted to say thank you. More companies/organizations should do this.
Once the money stream from a piece of code becomes thin, donate it to the public. Common sense.
Regards
Memories by Kolargol00 · 2012-08-06 15:26 · Score: 1

Ha the memories! I remember using CDE on Solaris (8?) and Digital Unix at the end of the 90s... My first contact with UNIX systems. :)

--
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more. Junta
NASA, Solaris, Motif and YOU! by Johnny+O · 2012-08-06 17:50 · Score: 1

During the MSL landing, if you look carefully at the big screen when they are getting the first 256x256 thumbnails, it is a MOTIF PULLDOWN MENU!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
.deb please! by nitrofurano · 2012-08-07 05:01 · Score: 1

where can we find binary i386 .deb packages for testing?
Re:This is why we can't have nice things. by lpq · 2012-08-07 10:55 · Score: 1

Releasing something that's 20 yr/o tech, because no one wants it anymore, isn't necessarily a great thing -- but it might do wonders for valuing at some absurd amount and taking the write-off in taxes...
now if MS open sourced Win7 or better, WinXP, .. that would be useful,
but who uses CDE?