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."

Comments

StarOffice Free

[grahamsz]

StarOffice may no longer be free but Open Office will remain free.

I think this is part of some master plan to conquer the problem of corporations who dont like free software because nobody is acountable.

Seems like a win-win situation - we get openoffice, corps get staroffice, microsoft get less sales.

Re:Qt

[Arandir]

I like feeding trolls, so sue me...

You are right that Qt and GTK+ are divided along language lines. For the most part, those who prefer C prefer GTK+ while those who prefer C++ prefer Qt. User interfaces are naturally object oriented, so in my opinion it makes sense to use a language that does OO well, like C++. Thus, everything else being equal, Qt is the better choice for writing GUI applications. Yes, I know you can do OO in C. So what? You can do OO in assembly, but I don't know anyone who does.

Okay, to the meat of the issue: the best and most advanced apps. Since most old time Unix hackers are C fanatics, they tend to use GTK+. But that doesn't rule out the multitude of fantastic advanced applications for Qt such as KOffice, KDevelop, Doxygen, QCad, etc.