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CDE Open Sourced
First time accepted submitter christurkel writes "CDE, the Common Desktop Project, has been open sourced by the Open Group. CDE was created by a collaboration of Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, Fujitsu and Hitachi. You can find the source here. It has been tested on Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu. Testers are encouraged to join the project. Motif will follow in a few months once some legal issues are sorted out."
Is that the Count from sesame street having an orgasm?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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.
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.
1. Create ugly environment
2. ???
3. Profit
4. Become irrelevant
5. Open source it
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!
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.
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/
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.
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..."
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.