Doghouse – Open Source Endurance

Longevity

Article from Issue 189/2016
Author(s):

I was reading an Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts (ALE) mailing list recently that has been around a long time. Many of the people on that list have been reading and writing to the list for 20 years. One of them had just installed a version of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), which was developed when I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) more than 20 years ago.

I was reading an Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts (ALE) mailing list recently that has been around a long time. Many of the people on that list have been reading and writing to the list for 20 years. One of them had just installed a version of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), which was developed when I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) more than 20 years ago.

The person writing about it talked about "Motif," a set of widgets that create the button boxes, scroll bars, and menus for the X Window System, and some of the various applications that came with CDE, such as the Motif Window Manager (MWM), xsnow (which made tiny snowflakes fall down the screen and build up on top of the windows and menubars), xroach (which had cockroaches scurry around and behind your windows), xeyes (eyes that would follow your cursor), xearth (a spinning "almost 3D" picture of the earth), and xfishtank (obviously, a fish tank for your system). It also came with some simple text editors, a "desktop," and various text-based startup files to tailor the environment.

During the exchange of messages, some commenters indicated that everyone thought CDE was dead in 2002; however, apparently the people that owned the code decided to open source it. Since that time, CDE has actually flourished despite all of the competing desktops out there.

[...]

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