18 May
2006
18 May
'06
3:39 a.m.
I have heard some grumblings of TOG possibly releasing CDE as open source,
but have no idea of where that stands. To be perfectly frank, it had a
lot of problems, especially in a 64-bit world. There were too many word
size assumptions, and a very good friend struggled for many, many hours
fixing those problems before it went to DEIL in India for support. It
could probably still benefit from a good many eyes developer review and
bug fix session in the hands of open source developers. However, IMHO, it
no longer has any advantage over KDE or Gnome, but, as I said, that is my
opinion.
Personally, Id love to see OSF1 released open source. There were
experimental x86 and two Itanium versions in various states of completion
floating around DEC/Compaq/HP. I was part of the last Itanium effort
before the HP merger. That one booted to single user before the project
was killed.
OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX was already branded as UNIX, and it would be
fun to see what would happen to the landscape if a branded UNIX was free.
Unfortunately, too many proprietary licensed pieces of code in the HP
version, especially in System V support, for that to ever happen. Oh well,
we can all dream
Pat
On Wed, 17 May 2006, patv(a)monmouth.com wrote:
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Another loss to the UNIX community that I can
personally report was the
closing, one year ago this month, of the old DEC Manalpan facility (UNX).
This was the home of VAX System V, a large portion of Ultrix, and
everything that made up OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX except for kernel,
drivers, and several other components (although I personally did some
kernel work on occasion). We did shell and utilities, about 1/2 of X,
Motif, CDE, installation, mail, and other parts of the OS that made it
useful. If you look at old uucp headers anywhere on usenet, any of the
traffic with headers that included systems with "unx" in the name was
routed through this facility. I was there from when it was Digital
through Compaq and finally HP, almost all the way through to the closing.
It would be nice if CDE were free, the rest is either part of the Heirloom
project or cloned in some open-source system (e.g., Lesstif). --;
-uso.
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