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 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and say it looks "horrible" could be compared to Windows 95 being open sourced and you skipping to saying "it's out of date".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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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..."
7. 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.
8. Re:That looks... by StefanWiesendanger · 2012-08-06 04:08 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Looks like you might have missed NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP during the 90s... :)
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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
13. 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.
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?

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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.

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10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
1. 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.
2. 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.
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 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.
2. 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.
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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.

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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
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Wow by StefanWiesendanger · 2012-08-06 04:05 · Score: 2

Woohoo, this is great news! Ah wait... it's 2012, not 1999...
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.'"
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.
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: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."
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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