First, they should move to GitHub or GitLab (or Codeberg) to attract more contributors and make the process of development easier. Maybe it could also be ported to support Wayland and Unicode properly, and remove some legacy code to ease up the maintenance.
CDE is included as one of the options in Sparky Linux:
https://sparkylinux.org/cde-common-desktop-environment/
For me, it's a bit broken, though; I can't get the terminal to launch, and without that, you can't do much.
I wrote a comparison of CDE and modern recreation NotSoCDE:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/28/battle_of_the_retro_d...
A chap I know led the campaign to open-source it and I wrote about it at the time:
https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/
First, they should move to GitHub or GitLab (or Codeberg) to attract more contributors and make the process of development easier. Maybe it could also be ported to support Wayland and Unicode properly, and remove some legacy code to ease up the maintenance.