Licensing
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The Open Group released Motif in 2000 as OpenMotif under a "revenue sharing" license that does not fully meet either the open source or free software definitions. (The Open Group had wished to make it open source, but did not quite succeed in achieving this.) In 2006, a petition was created asking The Open Group to release the source code for CDE and Motif under a free license.
The Xfce desktop at one time took part of its look and feel from the CDE environment, but no longer does.
OpenCDE, an open source project to replicate CDE, was started in early 2010. The project intended to reproduce the look and feel, organization, and feature set of CDE without using any CDE-derived code. The OpenCDE developers have joined the open-source CDE project.
On August 6, 2012, CDE was freed under the LGPL free software license.Its source code is available at SourceForge.
On October 23, 2012, the Motif widget toolkit has been released under the LGPL v2.1 as well, making CDE a completely free and open source desktop environment.
Read more about this topic: Common Desktop Environment