Jerry:

> I will certainly concede to your "change is alway painful" point.  But, 
> why does it have to go away?

It doesn't have to.  Features in CDE that are valuable can be ported
to GNOME anytime.  It is just a question of resources, will, and properly
identifying what the important features really are.

 > Many people have indicated that they will
> not/can not move forward with Gnome/JDS.

That's true.  However, we need to figure out what the really important
features are versus people just being unhappy about having to change.

 > And I certainly understand the time/manpower/monetary stance from Sun
 > in supporting multiple environments.

This is a factor, yes.

> Why can't Sun just put CDE and other things on a companion disk, and say 
> here is _______.  Sun will not support it, will not make bug fixes or 
> any other improvements or enhancements.

I don't think CDE is going away tomorrow, so users will likely be able
to continue using CDE for some time.  That said, CDE doesn't fit well
with Sun's future OpenSolaris plans.  Since CDE is proprietary, it can
never be a solution on the OpenSolaris platform.  I'm not sure it makes
sense to invest energies in a desktop that doesn't work across all of
Sun's future desktops.

> I believe that ultimately OLVWM was provided this way for OpenWindows.
> 
> Also, when Sun moved from SunOS 4.x to SunOS 5.x, the Berkley people 
> were given /usr/ucb/  .
> 
> I don't understand why this has to be so black and white.  Why can't 
> there be any middle ground with window managers?

I suspect if there is a real need, that someone will continue to
sell/support CDE (or CDE-like environments) for operating systems
like Solaris.  Perhaps the OpenMotif community might evolve in this
direction, for example.  In other words, it isn't black and white.
Nor do people need to think that Sun is the only provider for CDE
technologies, if that's what you really want to use.

Brian

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