Common Desktop Environment

After a long history as proprietary software, CDE was released as free software on August 6, 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.0 or later. Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported to Linux and BSD derivatives.

History

Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and USL announced CDE in June 1993 as a joint development within the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. Each development group contributed its own technology to CDE:

• HP contributed the primary environment for CDE, which was based on HP's Visual User Environment (VUE). HP VUE was itself derived from the Motif Window Manager.
• IBM contributed its Common User Access model from OS/2's Workplace Shell.
• Sun contributed its ToolTalk application interaction framework and a port of its DeskSet productivity tools, including mail and calendar clients, from its OpenWindows environment.
• USL provided desktop manager components and scalable systems technologies from UNIX System V.

After its release, HP endorsed CDE as the new standard desktop for Unix, and provided documentation and software for migrating HP VUE customizations to CDE.

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.

In February 1997, the Open Group released their last major version of CDE, version 2.1.

Red Hat Linux was the only Linux distribution that proprietary CDE was ported to. In 1997, Red Hat began offering a version of CDE licensed from TriTeal Corporation. In 1998, Xi Graphics, a company specializing in the X Windowing System, offered a version of CDE bundled with Red Hat Linux, called Xi Graphics maXimum cde/OS. These were phased out, and Red Hat moved to the GNOME desktop.

Until about 2000, users of Unix desktops regarded CDE as the de facto standard, but at that time, other desktop environments such as GNOME and K Desktop Environment 2 were quickly becoming mature, and became widespread on Linux systems.

In 2001, Sun Microsystems announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop environment in Solaris in favor of GNOME. Solaris 10, released in early 2005, includes both CDE and the GNOME-based Java Desktop System. The OpenSolaris project, begun around the same time, did not include CDE, and had no intent to make Solaris CDE available as open-source. The original release of Solaris 11 in November 2011 only contained GNOME as standard desktop, though some CDE libraries, such as Motif and ToolTalk, remained for binary compatibility but Oracle Solaris 11.4, released in August 2018, removed support for the CDE runtime environment and background services.

Systems that provided proprietary CDE

• IBM AIX
• Digital UNIX
• HP-UX: from version 10.10, released in 1996.
• IRIX: for a short time CDE was an alternative to IRIX Interactive Desktop.
• OpenVMS: available in OpenVMS Alpha V7.1 and onwards, referred to as the "DECWindows Motif New Desktop"
• Solaris: available starting with 2.3, standard in 2.6 to 10.
• Tru64 UNIX
• UnixWare
• UXP/DS
• Red Hat Linux: Two versions ported by Triteal and Xi Graphics