The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a proprietary desktop environment for Unix, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It is also the standard desktop environment on HP's OpenVMS.

CDE was announced in June 1993 as a joint development of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems as part of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. The primary environment was based on HP's VUE (Visual User Environment), itself derived from the Motif Window Manager (mwm). IBM contributed its Common User Access model and Workplace Shell. Novell provided desktop manager components and scalable systems technologies from UNIX System V. Sun contributed its ToolTalk application interaction framework and a port of its DeskSet productivity tools, including mail and calendar clients, from its OpenWindows environment.

History

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.

Until about 2000, CDE was considered the de facto standard for Unix desktops, but at that time, free software desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE were quickly becoming mature, and became almost universal on the Linux platform, which already had a larger user base than most commercial Unices in total. Red Hat is the only Linux OS which has had CDE ported to it, although it has been phased out in favour of GNOME.

In 2001, Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX) and Sun (Solaris) announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop on their workstations in favor of GNOME. However, in April 2003, HP reportedly opted to return to CDE, as GNOME had not stabilised sufficiently for their preference. It has been suggested that GNOME's non-frozen APIs were the main complaint.[weasel words] Solaris 10, released in early 2005, includes both CDE and the GNOME-based Java Desktop System. Future releases of Solaris will be based on the OpenSolaris open source project, which states that there is no plan to make the Solaris CDE "consolidation" (OS component) available as open source.

There is a petition asking The Open Group to release the source code of CDE and Motif under a free license. Motif was released in 2000 as OpenMotif under a "revenue sharing" license that does not fully meet either the open source or free software definitions. (The Open Group had wished to make it open source, but were not quite able to.)

Operating systems using CDE

AIX (IBM)

Digital UNIX (originally Digital Equipment Corporation, now Hewlett-Packard)

HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard)

OpenVMS (originally Digital Equipment Corporation, now Hewlett-Packard)

Solaris (Sun Microsystems)

Unixware (Univel)

IRIX (For a short time SGI offered CDE as an alternative to IID)