Sun, HP and IBM's Common Desktop Environment released as open source under LGPLv2

The release

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is now available as open-source software for the first time, according to the project's listing on SourceForge, which reached the Hacker News front page. CDE was created by a collaboration of Sun, HP, IBM, DEC, SCO, Fujitsu and Hitachi, and was used on a selection of commercial UNIX systems. The code is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.0, and the project maintains a wiki on SourceForge covering support and documentation.

A desktop with an unusual pedigree

The SourceForge listing describes CDE as an X11 desktop environment: a complete graphical workspace built on the X Window System, of the kind that shipped alongside commercial UNIX workstations. What distinguishes it historically is its origin. Rather than a single vendor building its own desktop, seven companies that competed hard in the UNIX market combined efforts on one shared environment. For many people who worked on commercial UNIX hardware in that period, CDE was simply the interface in front of them.

What users report

User reviews on the project page suggest the environment is usable well beyond nostalgia. One reviewer describes running CDE as a daily driver, calling it fast on modern hardware and praising its scripting system, built around Actions and ToolTalk, as notably advanced. The same reviewer notes that the bundled Mail application did not work for them, but says it was easy to swap in a different email client, and that the scripting facilities let them add missing functionality such as a screenshot tool. They also highlight a design decision that differs from most modern desktops: minimized applications live on the desktop itself rather than in a dock or taskbar, an approach the reviewer finds more sensible.

Another reviewer says adding applications to CDE's apps manager is straightforward, though attaching icons to them takes more effort, and describes the project as an invitation to revisit the Motif window manager family, including MWM and EMWM, along with Xresources configuration and older X utilities such as xclipboard. A third reviewer recalls working in Windows 3.11 while dreaming of the CDE workstations they could not afford, and argues that the desktop has held up well over the years. A fourth reports that a Raspberry Pi running CDE now resembles an old HP 9000 or RS/6000.

Why it matters

CDE is one of the rare pieces of software produced jointly by vendors who were otherwise rivals, and it represents an era of commercial UNIX computing that was previously locked behind proprietary licenses and expensive hardware. An LGPLv2 release changes that in practical terms. The code can now be studied, modified and redistributed by anyone, and the reviews indicate that it can be built and run on cheap modern hardware such as the Raspberry Pi rather than original workstations.

There is also a living-software angle. The reviewers' experiences suggest that CDE's scripting model still functions and can be extended with new behaviour, making the project a working reference for desktop automation concepts that predate today's frameworks. For historians, educators and curious engineers, the release turns a defining desktop of the commercial UNIX world from a sealed artifact into an open one, and the positive user ratings on the project page suggest there is still an active audience interested in keeping it that way.