
CDE Open Sourced - jonathansizz
http://cdesktopenv.sourceforge.net/
======
SwellJoe
I remember when CDE was awesome. It was not during this decade, er, century...

I think it would be useful for us to all pause and think about what being on
the right side of history looks like. CDE could have gone open source back in
the 90s and been extremely relevant and useful. I'm glad it's happened because
I think there's value in having an accurate and complete software
archaelogical history...but I doubt anyone will be digging into this as a
project to do current work on.

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dlinder
I read this as:

"CDE open sourced..." <audience laughter, comedic pause>

"...on SourceForge" <riotous laughter, fade to black>

~~~
barbs
Pardon my ignorance, but what's wrong with SourceForge? Is it simply not as
popular as other open-source project sites?

~~~
owyn
Sourceforge was great back in the day when it was the only (?) option for
public code hosting besides running your own site, but it's not as "cool"
now... it feels like most projects have left, only abandoned projects remain.
Putting a "new" project there seems strange. I don't know if that's due to
functionality or not though, maybe it's just that the UI feels dated. Even
with free offerings, people pay attention to the usability and UI, and
although I've never run a project using sourceforge, I don't think I'd ever
choose (or recommend) it over github or bitbucket. I'd love to hear reasons
why I'm wrong on that opinion?

~~~
gt384u
I had a conversation with a senior engineer on SourceForge where he pointed
out that most people forget that developers are actually a minority of their
business: most of their users are nontechnical people that come to them to
download binaries of things like zip utilities.

~~~
Argorak
It may be true that download users are their business, but developers
certainly are the drivers of the site. They produce the content.

Even then, the downloading experience is warped straight from the 90s.

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madrona
Bad memories of writing CS assignments on overtaxed Sun workstations, with
that crap WM. I fetishized those expensive purple boxes until I had to use
one.

~~~
dfc
SGI Indys were my purple box fetish.

~~~
wazoox
You mean Indigo, the Indy is blue :) (mine doesn't work anymore, alas, but the
Octane is doing great).

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opminion
Just what we needed, a timely contribution to help bring Linux to the desktop.
/sarcasm

~~~
spudlyo
Maybe soon we'll have open source Motif, then I'll finally be able to _not
give a shit_.

Funny timing though, I'm pretty sure I saw a Motif app or two on one of the
screens at NASA during the _Curiosity_ landing.

~~~
rjsw
What is wrong with Open Motif: <http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/> ?

~~~
lmm
If you'd actually read the page you link to you'd see the part where it says
"Read the faq for clarifications on the license... such as why Open Motif does
not meet the Open Source definition."

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meepmorp
I like that it's on Sourceforge, as though they're inviting people to ignore
it. That said, I'll probably try building it over the weekend, just for
nostalgia's sake.

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einhverfr
CDE... Oh the memories.

This is a good thing. Those few unfortunate souls who have to care will now
have free access to the code in order to figure out the problems they are
having.....

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Zenst
Excellent, was always my favorite GUI as was compact, fast, and could get on
with things with the only real distraction being xeye's that you could get
bored of very soon.

~~~
rogerbinns
You what? I worked on a competitor to CDE. We existed first and were actually
compact and fast. When CDE was announced it put a serious dent in our
business, but then was vapourware for quite a while so our sales returned. And
once available was bloated, ugly and slow.

We also had a side business in the graphical toolkit CDE used (Motif).
Basically we took the Motif from OSF, fixed bugs and made a whole host of
similar improvements and then sold and supported the result.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXI_Limited>

~~~
Zenst
Sorry to hear CDE hits a nerve with you. Vaugly recall your product from my
days at DHL and when we looked at UNIX on the desktop with SCO, but SCO etc
priced themselfs out of the market on that one on comparision to windows.

So what happened to your GUI today?

As for Motif, well OSF is the Open Source Foundation right and if so selling
open source, can see how that business model worked out.

IIRC your GUI was mostly desktop/PC based and in that CDE wasn't a competitor
so i'm somewhat confused, but I belive you.

~~~
rogerbinns
While we were a division of SCO, SCO weren't that relevant to us. They bought
IXI to ensure stability in supply of their desktop. SCO distinguished itself
from other Unix vendors by having a friendly desktop including for
administrators and their tools.

IIRC our business was something like 3% of sales on Intel chips with the rest
being RISC, although SCO itself isn't counted in that since we didn't sell on
the platform (corporate took the software and customized it to their needs).

SCO definitely considered Windows (NT) to be the competitor. However SCO was
considerably cheaper than the RISC workstations and operating systems. The
changing usage patterns are what led us into the browser space, into making
Motif look like Windows so when displayed on Windows it wasn't jarring, and
then our foray into letting you access any app via your browser which became
Tarantella.

OSF (you didn't get the expansion quite right) was a pawn in the Unix wars:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars> GUI issues in the Unix variants were
the battleground in the early nineties, and finally petered out in the late
nineties when Windows "won".

Our (IXI, not the SCO corporate parent) major product of the time was
X.desktop which only ran on Unix systems using the X window system. ie it was
Unix based apps to make Unix easy to use.

We then moved into "client access" which meant terminal emulators, X servers
for Windows and file access (VisionFS) which were Windows based programs to
make it easy to use Unix systems (except VisionFS).

Finally we did Tarantella which made it easy to use apps from just a web
browser, and it was irrelevant if the apps were Unix or Windows.

Tarantella was eventually bought by Sun which was eventually bought by Oracle,
but the product is still for sale. Some details at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Secure_Global_Desktop> (Disclosure: I was
the architect for the non-gui protocol parts of Tarantella)

VisionFS is what I am most proud of - details at
<http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html>

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abalashov
Speak for yourselves, I'm excited! Unity and GNOME and all the other useless
crap civilisation has invented over the last decade and a half? Get off my
lawn!

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Flow
Slightly off-topic:

What if they open sourced Open Step? Is that even possible to do? Would that
change open source Un*x desktops forever or would no-one care?

~~~
zokier
I doubt that it would have significant impact. There is already GNUstep which
is GNU implementation/clone of OpenStep.

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JulianMorrison
I wonder if this might actually be useful for people on very restricted (or
legacy) hardware? How does it stack up against eg: LXDE?

