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

"Revolution OS", not "Revolution codec"...

[Papineau]

I juste tried to download the trailer of Revolution OS, and since I use Mozilla 1.0rc2 (yes, I know 1.0rc3 has been released) on Linux, I'm not able to view it. It seems to be offered in Real, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and Flash(?, probably for surfing the site and not the actual film). So I'm not sure who's targetted by this... but I know I'm not able to view it easily (could fire up Mplayer, but still need a copy of the actual file). Not very good for a film of this nature.

Anybody had more luck than me?

Re:Surprised

[Zeinfeld]

I'm actually surprised that any of them were really Nigerian. I would have expected the scam to be run by some guy named Tony living in New Jersey that had set up a psuedo-corporation in Nigeria.

The info I got on the scam was that there is a definite Nigerian connection. A number of people duped in the scheme have gone off to meet people in Nigeria, some have disappeared entirely.

Scams of that sort are much easier to conduct in a country where laws are not exactly diligently enforced so Nigeria would be a much more likely base than the US. Compared to the Nigerian mafia Tony Soprano is a real small time player, all he has is a garbage business and a strip joint, in Nigeria they run the country.

Re:LGPL and GPL

[amccall]

That sounds all well and good, but...

..doesn't the LGPL give the option of redistribution under the GPL? So, if you distribute your program under the LGPL, anyone can redistribute it under the terms of the GPL.

Which is to say, by LGPL'ing your software, you are effectively dual licensing it with the GPL anyway(it's implied).

So, what's the point?

Region-free: bad tactical idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be better if they released it for region 2 only instead, at least for a while. People could then complain to them about how they can't view it in the USA. Then, they could make an official statement that they as the copyright holders do not mind if viewers in region 1 use any other player or process (including DeCSS) to play their own legitimately purchased DVDs.

Voilla! Now DeCSS has substantial non-infringing uses and since they have the explicit authorization of the copyright-holder, the DMCA can no longer be used against it.

Sure, it might cost them a few sales at the beginning. But the free press would more than make up for it when they quietly release region 1 disks a few months later.

Qt, rosegarden, etc.

[bcrowell]

Some random thoughts and questions about the Qt-Gtkmm debate:

1. Qt turns me off because you can't do cross-platform without paying big licensing fees. GTK turns me off because in the only examples I've seen, the code just looked like an untracked wilderness: hundreds and hundreds of unreadable toolkit calls, one after the next. I like Perl/Tk, but it doesn't make a nice double-clickable GUI. Are there better alternatives? How do people like wxWindows?
2. This is kinda OT, but since a bunch of the article used Rosegarden as an example, I'm curious: does anyone have comments on Rosegarden as opposed to GNU Lilypond?
3. I've been using Unix more or less continuously for 20 years, but I've only started using Linux within the fast few months, and although my impression is pretty favorable overall, I'm shocked at how hard it is to install applications, partly because of how the use shared libraries, and all the hassles associated with having the wrong version of the libraries, having them in the wrong place, etc. This seems to be an argument in favor of Qt, since it has more built in, so there's less need to link in a lot of extra crap. The article is all about the programmer's point of view, but does it actually help from the user's point of view?

Revolution OS on DVD

[ncc74656]

I just checked the website, and the only mention of DVD availability is this page where you can tell them you're interested. A Google search turned up this page on why it's not on DVD already.

As for the possibility that the DVD will be region-free, I was at the screening in Pasadena three weeks ago. J.T.S. Moore did a little Q&A at the end of the film; in response to a question, he did mention that a region-free, CSS-free release is a possibility that's being considered. From what I gathered, the decision isn't yet final. I also gathered that he doesn't have much love for the movie cartel. Neither the movie site nor iFilm mentioned specific release dates or prices.

(If it becomes available, I'd buy it. I liked it, and I'm not the open-source zealot that some people around here are (I tend to use whatever's appropriate for the task at hand). If a large enough number of copies get sold and it doesn't turn up on Gnutella, maybe it'll be a small lesson to the movie cartel about treating your customers right.)