OK, I’m a sucker for the melodramatics, and I got goose bumps on August 15, 2000. I was sitting in the most unlikely place for this to occur — the pressroom at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Jose, CA. At the podium was Sun Microsystems’ Marco Boerries. What caused the shiver to run up my spine was the fact that he was talking about how his company was about to dump its venerable CDE in favor of the GNOME desktop.
OK, I’m a sucker for the melodramatics, and I got goose bumps on August 15, 2000. I was sitting in the most unlikely place for this to occur — the pressroom at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Jose, CA. At the podium was Sun Microsystems’ Marco Boerries. What caused the shiver to run up my spine was the fact that he was talking about how his company was about to dump its venerable CDE in favor of the GNOME desktop.
Then, Hewlett Packard got up and announced pretty much the same thing. I thought to myself, “The big guys are finally getting it; the open source community is setting the new Unix standards, and they’re adopting them.” It was fantastic!
Of course, the Linux community has known, or at least sensed, that this has been going on for years. But, this was a momentous occasion for all of open source. CDE was developed very much in the old-school Unix way — by big companies like Sun, HP, and IBM. They would get together under the auspices of a standards organization (here the Open Software Foundation), bicker about technical issues, finally agree on a standard, and then go home to implement CDE in their own separate ways.
In an…
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