Everything about Decwindows totally explained
The
Common Desktop Environment (
CDE) is a
graphical desktop environment for
Unix, based on the
Motif widget toolkit. It is also the standard desktop environment on
HP's OpenVMS.
History
CDE was announced in June
1993 as a joint development of
Hewlett-Packard,
IBM,
Novell and
Sun Microsystems as part of 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.
In March 1994 CDE became the responsibility of the "new OSF", a merger of the
Open Software Foundation and
Unix International; in September 1995, the merger of Motif and CDE into a single project, CDE/Motif, was announced. OSF became part of the newly formed
Open Group in 1996.
Until about
2000, CDE was considered the
de facto standard for Unix desktops, 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'd phase out CDE as the standard desktop on their workstations in favor of GNOME. However, in April
2003, HP reportedly opted to return to CDE, as GNOME hadn't stabilised sufficiently for their preference. It has been suggested that GNOME's non-frozen
APIs were the main complaint. 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's no plan to make the Solaris CDE "consolidation" (OS component) available as open source.
There is a petition asking The Open Group to release the source code of CDE and Motif under a free license. Motif was released in 2000 as
OpenMotif under a "revenue sharing" license that doesn't fully meet either the
open source or
free software definitions. (The Open Group had wished to make it open source, but were not quite able to.)
Operating systems using CDE
Further Information
Get more info on 'Decwindows'.
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