Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Peter Howkins wrote: >> I'd hope that if Sun or the other contributors were >> no longer deriving a commercial benifit from it >> being closed, that they wouldn't object to CDE >> being open sourced if they were asked. > > Certainly - but if it requires a lot of work digging through > old source code and contracts to determine who owns what and > who has to give permission, Sun isn't likely to volunteer a > large team of engineers & lawyers to do this. (The initial > OpenSolaris ON code base took several dozen engineers and > lawyers most of a year to sift through the 10 million lines > of code released and to evaluate the relevant matching licenses > for each - CDE is a couple million on it's own, and while there > shouldn't be as many different copyright owners involved, there > are still more than just a couple to sort through.) > > For big, old, diversely-owned code bases, releasing as open source > isn't cheap or easy. >
The Open Group has already released an open source version of Motif. That probably makes up the bulk of CDE. The remaining bits are available from the Open Group, who still charges money for source licenses. http://www.opengroup.org/desktop/ordering/cde.price.list.htm I think to get CDE open sourced, someone would have to push the Open Group to open up the source. I am not sure if that is very likely to occur. Such a release would not include Sun's additions to CDE (e.g. sdtimage, sdtperfmeter, and all the other sdt* applications), but would be a huge step in the right direction. Given that some sites are going to be very unlikely to want to shift from CDE to Gnome (legacy desktop environments, some of which are controlled or integrated with 3rd party applications), I think there is a real market for continuing CDE support. Frankly, I actually like CDE, although I must say that lately I've been very happy with Xfce4. <soapbox> Gnome/JDS are far too piggish for my taste -- even my Ultra 20 notices the resource consumption, and on a shared Sun Ray server Gnome sucks up resources like crazy, though it has a hard time competing with Mozilla/Firefox. Also, for my 2c, I've noticed that Gnome tends to be somewhat fragile, as I've had to delete my configuration files on more than one occasion to recover from errors in the past. CDE was subject to the same fragility, which is why I'm now using XFce4. I've not yet had a crash or failure in XFce4 that made me delete my preferences files to recover. I can't speak to KDE, but I'm a fan of the lightweight approach favored by XFce4. As far as I can tell these problems have been with Gnome or CDE, not with the underlying GTK or Motif technology. I hope the latest releases of Gnome are a bit more robust. </soapbox> -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
