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Common Desktop Environment

From Alfawiki
Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
Company typeSoftware
IndustryDesktop environment
FoundedJune 1993; 33 years ago (1993-06)
FounderHewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, Unix System Laboratories
Headquarters
United States
ProductsDesktop environment software
Websitesourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment designed for Unix and OpenVMS platforms, constructed upon the Motif widget toolkit. It played a significant role as part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard and functioned as the dominant desktop interface for commercial Unix workstations over an extended period. CDE's design influenced early desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME, which largely supplanted it after the turn of the millennium.

Initially distributed as proprietary software, CDE was made available as free software on August 6, 2012, under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.0 or any later version. Following this release, it has been adapted to run on Linux distributions and several BSD variants.

History

In June 1993, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and Unix System Laboratories collaborated to announce the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) within the framework of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. Each company contributed essential elements: Hewlett-Packard provided the foundational environment derived from its Visual User Environment (VUE); IBM added its Common User Access concepts from OS/2's Workplace Shell; Sun offered the ToolTalk messaging system and DeskSet productivity applications originating from OpenWindows; while Unix System Laboratories supplied desktop management components from UNIX System V.

Hewlett-Packard promoted CDE as the Unix standard desktop environment, facilitating a transition from its HP VUE system. In March 1994, governance of CDE shifted to the newly merged "new OSF," a union of the Open Software Foundation and Unix International. By September 1995, projects related to Motif and CDE were consolidated into a single entity known as CDE/Motif. The OSF was integrated into the Open Group in 1996, which subsequently released CDE version 2.1 in February 1997.

Among Linux distributors, Red Hat was unique in licensing proprietary CDE software, distributing it from 1997 through TriTeal Corporation. In 1998, Xi Graphics included CDE with Red Hat Linux under the name Xi Graphics maXimum cde/OS, though these editions were eventually discontinued in favor of GNOME adoption.

Up until approximately 2000, CDE was widely regarded as the default Unix desktop standard. Nonetheless, newer environments such as GNOME and KDE rapidly gained popularity on Linux platforms. In 2001, Sun Microsystems declared intentions to supplant CDE with GNOME within Solaris. Solaris 10 (released in 2005) featured both CDE and the GNOME-based Java Desktop System; however, the OpenSolaris project omitted CDE and did not release it as open source.

Solaris 11 (2011) shipped exclusively with GNOME as its default desktop environment, though certain components like Motif and ToolTalk persisted for backward compatibility purposes. Oracle Solaris 11.4 (2018) removed support for running CDE runtime services and background processes.

Platforms offering proprietary CDE

License history

Until 2012, CDE was distributed as proprietary software.

The toolkit underlying CDE, known as Motif, was made available by The Open Group in 2000 under the name "Open Motif" with a "revenue sharing" license. This licensing model did not meet the criteria for either open source or free software. Although The Open Group intended to release Motif under an open source license, this goal was not realized at that time.

Transition to GNU LGPL Licensing

In 2006, a formal request was made urging The Open Group to release the source code of both CDE and Motif under a free software license. Subsequently, on August 6, 2012, CDE was officially released under the LGPL-2.0-or-later and published on SourceForge.

The OpenCDE initiative, a free software project launched in 2010 aiming to replicate CDE’s appearance and functionality, was discontinued in August 2012 following the official open source release of CDE.

Later that year, on October 23, 2012, the Motif widget toolkit was also released under the LGPL-2.1-or-later, allowing CDE to be fully embraced as a free and open source desktop environment.

Following these developments, a Debian 6-based live CD named CDEbian was created featuring CDE pre-installed; however, this project has since been discontinued.

The Debian-derived distribution SparkyLinux provides precompiled CDE packages accessible via APT. As of March 2023, CDE is included in NuTyX GNU/Linux with an ISO image available for download, is supported on FreeBSD, and is distributed in source form through pkgsrc, the default package management system for NetBSD.

Development under the CDE Project

March 2014 marked the release of the first stable version of CDE as free software: version 2.2.1.

Beginning with version 2.2.2 in July 2014, CDE added support for FreeBSD 10 when compiled using the standard Clang compiler.

Version 2.3.0, launched in July 2018, introduced TIRPC support on Linux systems, removing the requirement to run rpcbind in insecure mode. This release also deprecated Xprint usage and enabled compilation on BSD variants without needing a custom Motif build. Additionally, multihead display capabilities via Xinerama were improved.

Since its transition to free software status, CDE has been ported across various platforms including:

Future development plans emphasize broadening compatibility with additional Linux, BSD, and Unix operating systems and enhancing internationalization features to support a wider range of languages.

See also

External links

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