Demise
By June 1993, the major UNIX players, including AT&T and Sun, had decided that a truly unified Unix was necessary in order to better compete against Microsoft and had formed the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. The unified desktop for this initiative became the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), and the look and feel chosen for it was based on Motif. Sun announced its plans to immediately offer Motif and start retiring OpenWindows, by then the predominant implementation of the OPEN LOOK look and feel.
Sun began by offering the Motif developer toolkit and mwm window manager as a standalone product for use with Sun's Solaris Operating System until CDE was released in 1995. OpenWindows remained the primary Solaris desktop environment until 1997, when CDE became the primary desktop for Solaris 2.6. Even then, OpenWindows was still included with Solaris and could continue to be used instead of CDE.
When Solaris 9 was released in 2002, development support for XView and OLIT-based applications was finally removed, as were the olwm window manager and the OPEN LOOK versions of the DeskSet productivity tools.
Applications already developed using XView and OLIT can still be executed and displayed in both Solaris 9 and 10, but are no longer supported in Solaris 11. There are also at least two projects continuing development of OpenWindows software: "OWAcomp" makes it possible to still use the OPEN LOOK Deskset tools, as well as compile OPEN LOOK applications; "openlook" is based on OpenWindows code released as open source, but has added additional components that were not open sourced by Sun.
Read more about this topic: OPEN LOOK