CDE Open Sourced 263
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."
AH AH AH AH (Score:1, Insightful)
AH! Ah! Ah! Ah!
CDE open sourced now ?
Nowadays it is only of interest to historians.
Re:AH AH AH AH (Score:4, 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...
Re:Nice (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:Let me be the first to say: GOOD JOB (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:15 again (Score:4, 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.
Re:That looks... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:CDE and LessTif are both LGPL, but v2 vs. v3? (Score:3, 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...