> (There was also some concern that it would just be a
> "dump it out and let it
> rot" open sourcing without a community to sustain
>  it long-term, which we
>  don't see much benefit in.)

I think "Open"Motif is doing ok, so if some independent developers here
and elsewhere were to get behind it, I think an Open CDE would do okay.
Certainly there are a few quirks some of us would like to fix, as well
as a few enhancements that might be of broad interest.  CDE is
presently a good deal more lightweight (or at least feels faster)
than GNOME, so I would hope people wouldn't just want to make it
into another overblown Windows clone.  Which is not to say that GNOME
or KDE don't serve some folks well.  So hopefully it would be more in the
order of maintenance plus a few quirk-if-not-quite-bug fixes (have icon
positions be remembered across dtwm restart, for example), small
enhancements (alternate buffer for dtterm; maybe rationalize some of
the more obscure default translations), and documenting some of the
internals (e.g. for communication between dtstyle and dtwm and/or dtsession)
that may well have to remain more or less stable anyway for over-the-wire
compatibility between versions.  Dtmail could also use some work (multiple
mail account support, more IMAP authentication techniques, and if there's
an HTML widget that can play nicely with Motif, maybe better
multipart/alternative support than just treating everything other than
a basic text body as an attachment; but lots of care not to execute anything
or access remote URLs without permission).  One day, when there's also real
multi-axis (horizontal as well as vertical) scroll-wheel support, that should be
added too.  Mostly nothing huge, would still look very retro to a lot of folks, 
but
would be enough more predictable in its behavior and do just enough more to
extend its useful life quite a bit.
 
 
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