Common Desktop Environment

The Common Desktop Environment, CDE short, is a published under LGPL desktop environment for Unix systems and Motif used as the underlying toolkit for creating graphical elements.

CDE was developed as proprietary software since June 1993 members of the Open Group, the companies like HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems. It was until 2000, the standard desktop in many commercial Unix systems. Due to the rapid development of alternative free desktop environments like GNOME or KDE on Linux, however, the future of CDE is uncertain because the two Unix vendor Sun and HP announced the change from CDE to GNOME already in 2001. Since early 2006, Sun Solaris 10 includes both CDE and the GNOME - based Java Desktop System. In OpenSolaris there is no longer the CDE desktop. On 6 August 2012, the source code of CDE under the LGPL been published. The previous petition to disclose the sources was thus successful. The CDE source code is available on SourceForge.

Inspired by CDE following open source desktops emerged:

• KDE
• Xfce