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and say it looks "horrible" could be compared to Windows 95 being open sourced and you skipping to saying "it's out of date".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 Xiaran · 2012-08-06 03:10 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Ah. I see you are someone who has never used Open Look.
3. 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.
4. 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..."
5. 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.
6. Re:That looks... by StefanWiesendanger · 2012-08-06 04:08 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Looks like you might have missed NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP during the 90s... :)
7. 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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.