Common Desktop Environment

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Common Desktop Environment
Image:Cde.svg


DECwindows CDE on OpenVMS 7.3-1
Developed by The Open Group
OS Unix, OpenVMS
Genre Desktop environment
License Proprietary
Website www.opengroup.org/cde

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE), a graphical desktop environment for Unix, leverages the Motif widget toolkit. HP's OpenVMS uses CDE as its standard desktop environment.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Corporate history

SunSoft, HP, IBM and USL announced CDE in June 1993 as a joint development within the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. The primary environment was based on HP's VUE (Visual User Environment), itself derived from the Motif Window Manager (mwm). IBM contributed its Common User Access model and Workplace Shell. Novell provided desktop manager components and scalable systems technologies from UNIX System V. Sun contributed its ToolTalk application interaction framework and a port of its DeskSet productivity tools, including mail and calendar clients, from its OpenWindows environment.[1]

In March 1994 CDE became the responsibility of the "new OSF", a merger of the Open Software Foundation and Unix International;[2] in September 1995, the merger of Motif and CDE into a single project, CDE/Motif, was announced.[3] OSF became part of the newly formed Open Group in 1996.[4]

Until about 2000, users of Unix desktops regarded CDE as the de facto standard, but at that time, free software desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE were quickly becoming mature, and became almost universal on the Linux platform, which already had a larger user base than most commercial Unices in total. Red Hat is the only Linux OS which has had CDE ported to it, although it has been phased out in favour of GNOME.

In 2001, Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX) and Sun (Solaris) announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop on their workstations in favor of GNOME. However, in April 2003, HP reportedly[citation needed] opted to return to CDE, as GNOME had not stabilised sufficiently for their preference. Some[who?] regard GNOME's non-frozen APIs as HP's main issue with GNOME.

Solaris 10, released in early 2005, includes both CDE and the GNOME-based Java Desktop System. Future releases of Solaris will be based on the OpenSolaris open source project, which states that there is no plan to make the Solaris CDE "consolidation" (OS component) available as open source.[5]

A petition exists asking The Open Group to release the source code of CDE and Motif under a free license.[6] The Open Group released Motif in 2000 as OpenMotif under a "revenue sharing" license that does not fully meet either the open source or free software definitions. (The Open Group had wished to make it open source, but did not quite succeed in achieving this.[7])

[edit] Version history

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Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.


[edit] Operating systems using CDE

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hewlett-Packard, IBM Corporation, SunSoft, Inc., UNIX System Laboratories, X/Open Company Ltd. (June 30, 1993). "UNIX Leaders Complete First Release of Specification for Common Open Software Environment Desktop". Press release. Retrieved on 2007-11-30.
  2. ^ AT&T Global Information Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Corporation, SunSoft Incorporated, et al. (March 23, 1994). "Leading Vendors Unify to Accelerate Open Source". Press release. Retrieved on 2008-05-15.
  3. ^ Open Software Foundation (September 7, 1995). "OSF Announces Formal Launch of CDE/Motif Project". Press release. Retrieved on 2008-05-15.
  4. ^ X/Open Company Ltd. Open Software Foundation (February 14, 1996). "X/Open and OSF Join to Create The Open Group". Press release. Retrieved on 2008-05-16.
  5. ^ OpenSolaris Consolidation Information. OpenSolaris Web site. Retrieved on 2007-12-01.
  6. ^ Peter Howkins. Petition to Open Source CDE and Motif. Retrieved on 2007-11-30.
  7. ^ Open Motif Frequently Asked Questions. The Open Group (July 13, 2004). Retrieved on 2007-11-30.

[edit] External links

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