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."
small missing bit of information (Score:5, 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 [sourceforge.net] guys that they put so much work into cloning it that could've been avoided if Motif had been open-sourced years ago.
Hooray! More life for old systems! And new! (Score:5, 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 (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!
Re:That looks... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:small missing bit of information (Score:4, 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.
Re:That looks... (Score:4, 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.