QandA

1) What is CDE?

CDE is a desktop environment similar in scope to KDE, Gnome or Xfce. It was designed to unite the various windowing systems used on the Unixes of the day (OpenLook, Panorama, 4Dwm, etc) to create a uniform look to make training on new systems easier for companies.

For a rather dated and marketing view of CDE see [What is CDE?].

CDE contains a window manager for windows placement and control, a session manager to maintain state across logins, a workspace manager supporting virtual desktops, ToolTalk for inter-process communication, application launchers and dock and a suite of accessory programs such as a file manager, simple text editor, terminal emulator, calculator, calendar and email.

2) What is the history behind CDE?

CDE was developed, from 1993, by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to build upon the GUI work done in Motif. Contributions came from HP, DEC, AT&T, Sun and SCO. HP donated HPVUE, which resembled what became CDE. Sun donated it's desktop tools, mail, calendar, etc. AT&T gave workspace communication software and SCO the session manager and virtual desktop from Panorama. Later Fujitsu and Hitachi also contributed to the project.

CDE 1.0 was released in 1995 and was quickly adopted among various UNIX vendors. SGI even used CDE for a time as an alternative to Indigo Magic Desktop.

In 1996 OSF merged with X/Open to create The Open Group.

In 1997 The Open Group released CDE 2.1, the last major revision.

3) What license is it released under?

The source code to the programs and libraries are released under the GNU LGPL 2.0 or later. The media files such as icons, backdrop and documentation are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 licence.

See the file COPYING for more details.

4) What does the license allow me to do with it?

The LGPL allows users to run, modify, expand and reuse the CDE code.

CDE use of the LGPL has a clarification with regards to static or dynamic linking against unmodified versions of the code;

This should allow commercial programs to carry on using the open versions of CDE libraries without placing any addition worries on them about the 'viral' nature of the licence.

Please see the file COPYING within the distribution for more information.

5) What about Motif, is that available too?

Yes, it is under the LGPL as well.

The LGPL allows users to run, modify, expand and reuse the Motif code. Motif use of the LGPL has a clarification with regards to static or dynamic linking against unmodified versions of the code;

This should allow commercial programs to carry on using the open versions of CDE libraries without placing any addition worries on them about the 'viral' nature of the licence. Please see the file COPYING within the distribution for more information.

6) What version of Motif is CDE built against?

Motif, the X widget library that CDE is built against will need to be at least version 2.1.30. It has also been compiled against OpenMotif 2.3.3, the further semi-open development of The Open Group's Motif (which is API and ABI compatible with 2.1.30).

7) Can I build CDE with Lesstif?

LessTif is an independent implementation of the OSF/Motif 2.1 library released under the GNU LGPL, meant to be compatible with Motif.

Building against Lesstif is untested and unsupported. It is also highly unlikely to work.

8) I'm interested in running it, on what platforms is it available?

It currently works on several Linux distributions, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Solaris/Illumos, for more details see [SupportedPlatforms].

9) How can I contribute?

There are many ways to contribute. You can sending patches, test software, write documentation or simply hang out in IRC and answer questions.

Join us on IRC in #cde on Libera, using an IRC client or the web client.

You can join the Developer Mailing List.

10) What is OpenCDE?

OpenCDE is an independent implementation of a GUI environment on top of the OpenMotif release designed to mimic closely the CDE GUI. It was started by Karsten Pederson in 2010. With the open sourcing of CDE, OpenCDE was deprecated.

11) So this isn't OpenCDE?

No, this is the release of the full sources to the previously proprietary CDE that was shipped with various commercial UNIXs.