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Slashback: Film, Solaris, Contention

Slashback with a load of updates for you tonight on modchips for Xbox, Nigerian spam-scams, missing Mozilla hackers, Guillaume Laurent on Murray on Guillaume Laurent, and more. Read on for the details.

Sun giveth and taketh away. axehind writes: "This ZDNet article tells us StarOffice will no longer be free. The decision completes the transition of the StarOffice suite back to being a paid product, as it was when Sun bought the software along with its maker, Germany's Star Division, in 1999. Sun says it will stop free downloads of StarOffice 5.2 at midnight on Wednesday night."

On the other hand, The Pi-Guy writes: "It has been confirmed by Sun that Solaris 9 will be on Intel platforms - you can get it for free on DVD here. Quite surprising considering that a few months ago they were saying 'No S9 at all on x86!'"

Update: 05/29 03:03 GMT by T : As several readers have noticed, the page no longer indicates Solaris 9 once you've chosen x86 as your platform of choice -- looks like a case of mistaken identity.

Strong opinions tend to draw answers. Guillaume Laurent writes "Given that Murray mentions me in his interview, and that I disagree with most of what he says, I felt the need to reply. Enjoy."

Six seems a tad low. supafly613 writes: "Six people were arrested in South Africa over the weekend on suspicion of being involved in the infamous 'Nigerian' e-mail and letter fraud. Four of those detained were Nigerian, one was Cameroonian and the sixth was South African. Police in South Africa believe that the six are part of an international fraud and drug-dealing cartel, sending out thousands of e-mail and letters in an attempt to defraud."

Lost in cyberspace ... Mindphunk writes "Six hackers remain to be found so that Mozilla can be relicensed under the LGPL and GPL as well as the MPL original license. This is really important if Mozilla is going to interoperate readily with all kinds of free software. Perhaps the power of Slashdot can find them in time for the 1.0 release?? The missing hackers are:

  • David Nebinger
  • 'Uncle George'
  • Sanjay Gupta
  • Makoto Kato
  • Thierry LeBouiland
  • Jiwei Wang"

This is a followup to our earlier mention of the missing hackers.

Still waiting for NetBSD :) llordsmiff writes: "According to this, the world's first Xtender Xbox modchip preorders were shipped today (24 May). There are installation pictures also. "It plays back all import and backups on all worldwide sold Xbox machines." It's also supposed to play any DVD, regardless of region."

Wonder if this will be 'content protected.' neema writes: "Just a bit of an update to an older post, but Revolution OS will apparently be released on DVD (region free) in September for 20 dollars. Trailer and first 8 minutes can be found here. I, for one, welcome the chance to see it."

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Solaris 9 really for intel? by pythas · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmm. I looked at the sun link provided above, and it gives you 2 choices:

    Solaris 9 for Sparc
    Solaris 8 for Intel

    Are you sure they're releasing 9 for intel?

  2. Re:LGPL and GPL by MisterBlister · · Score: 4, Informative
    By dual licencing under the LGPL and GPL (not to mention MPL) those who develop derivitive works can decide whether to use the LGPL, GPL or MPL for their project.

    So say I create an offshoot of Mozilla called Boozila, I can pick the LGPL license for this project, which means anyone who derives from my work must abide by the LGPL (or they can go use the original Mozilla source minus my changes and use GPL, or MPL..up to them!).

    In essence, it gives developers a bit of a choice over which licenses they want to support while using the codebase...They are free to choose GPL, LGPL or MPL.

  3. Re:Will it be piracy to copy Staroffice after midn by Triskaidekaphobia · · Score: 4, Informative
    The EULA says


    1. License to Use. Sun grants to you a non-exclusive and
    non-transferable license for the internal use only of the
    accompanying software and documentation and any error
    corrections provided by Sun (collectively "Software"). You
    have no right to distribute the Software.


    so the answer is no.

    (This assumes the EULA hasn't changed since the time you didn't read it.