From The Register:

“Microsoft sharpshooter Joachim Kempin, who was convicted of illegally shooting antelope in Montana in 1998, has been turning his guns on a more
familiar target: Microsoft’s own OEM customers.
The States’ remedy hearing opened in DC yesterday, and States attorney Steven Kuney produced a devastating memo from Kempin, then in charge of
Microsoft’s OEM business, written after Judge Jackson had ordered his break-up of the company. Kempin raises the possibility of threatening Dell and
other PC builders which promote Linux.”

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – March 19, 2002 – Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced enhanced support offerings for the upcoming release of StarOffice 6.0 that will expand the reach of the popular office productivity suite. Maintaining its commitment to providing the best value and most cost-effective solutions in multi-platform, full-featured office productivity software, Sun will continue to enable a no-charge download of the OpenOffice.org version of the application through the OpenOffice.org project. In addition, Sun will fully support the on-going community development process through OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) and will discontinue the no-charge download of StarOffice, instead, offering it for sale through a variety of channels. Specific pricing will be announced when StarOffice 6.0 is available in the coming months.

“The momentum of StarOffice 5.2 carried over to StarOffice 6.0 with nearly one million requests for download of the beta version in just three months,” said Mike Rogers, vice president and general manager of desktop and office productivity, Sun Microsystems. “Through the StarOffice 6.0 beta program, we gained valuable customer feedback saying they would prefer to pay for a product from Sun that was bundled with value-added support and services. Therefore, our enhanced product and support offerings will meet the diverse needs of our broad customer base, specifically, office productivity tools for a multi-platform environment.”

“It’s clear that Sun is moving to a StarOffice business model that is sustainable for the long haul,” said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC’s vice president of system software research. “With this new structure in place, organizations of all sizes are certain to feel more comfortable knowing that the software will be commercially supported and will continue to evolve with the needs of the market.”

With the enhanced services and support, StarOffice software (branded StarSuiteTM in Asian markets) maintains its commitment to providing a low cost, full-featured office suite for day-to-day tasks, such as creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations and databases on Linux, Solaris and Windows platforms. StarOffice software will continue to target cost conscious organizations in both the public and private sector who are evaluating their current office productivity budgets.

StarOffice software will be provided at a nominal charge based on a tiered, per-user structure. Sun will offer services and support contracts for help desk and end-user support, training, software upgrades and deployment and migration services.

Sun will continue to distribute StarOffice 6.0 through agreements with hardware OEMs, Linux distributors and software vendors. New Sun hardware, including SunRay(TM) appliances and Solaris workstations, will continue to come pre-installed with the StarOffice 6.0 software, once launched.

“StarOffice is a great value for consumers and small businesses,” said Eric Bassat, director of software at NEC CI, product marketing EMEA. “By pre-installing StarOffice on all new PC systems from NEC, we are able to provide customers with an essential application for both their Home and Office needs.”

“We are very excited to see a new version of the best office suite available on Linux,” said Frederic Bastok, co-founder and CTO of MandrakeSoft. “More and more corporate users are switching to Linux on desktops, so providing them an office suite fills an important opportunity.”

StarOffice 6.0 also will be offered to end-users through various retail channels. The retail package will include the software CD and user manual, Web-based training, a bundled support incident certificate and availability on Linux, Solaris and Windows platforms. It will continue to be priced under $100. The education market, which will be handled by the Sun Education line of business, will pay only for the cost of the media (CD-ROM) and shipping.

About OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is the open source, community-developed, multi-platform, multi-lingual office suite offering key desktop applications such as word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. OpenOffice.org, the source project, at www.openoffice.org is the home of the open source code development and the community.

About StarOffice Software

StarOffice software offers a full-featured, multi-platform office suite with word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, Web-publishing, charting, formula-editing and database applications that offer everyone from large organizations to governments to small business to individuals a cost effective multi-platform alternative to proprietary office suites.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision – “The Network Is The Computer[tm]” – has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com.

©2002: Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, StarOffice, StarSuite, Solaris, SunRay and the Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

From The Register:
“The Canadian government is mulling copyright levy proposals which will see a royalty charge of CAN$1.23 imposed on each blank CDR, and CAN$100 added
to each MP3 player sold in the country.”

Frank writes “The new maintainer of the 2.4 kernel, Marcelo Tosatti, reflects on his first four months on the job, and sizes up the ongoing effort of managing the care and feeding of Linux.”

From PCWorld:
“You may never get the chance to save and share your favorite TV shows and digital films over the Internet, Napster-like. Hollywood and the technology
industry are teaming up to develop a technology, to be unveiled at the end of March, that will stop digital video from being transmitted on most
networks–even your home network.”

bryam writes, “Sun Microsystems adquires Clustra Systems: “The Clustra technology will enable multiple software products from Sun,beginning with the iPlanetApplication Server …” Read the announcement at Yahoo.”

Jeff Gerhardt writes, “Tuesday, March 9th, 2002 from the home of Wayne’ s World, Aurora IL: Tonight LIVE on www.thelinuxshow.com at 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9pm et, Kevin Hill, Jeff Gerhardt, Doc Searls (Linux Journal), Arne Flones and Russ Pavlicek; have another CLASSIC show lined up tonight on The Linux Show!!

In Segment One – Hot News: We will be covering the hot Linux news of the last few weeks. In particular we will talk about a series of stories on none other than, MICROSOFT. Microsoft came very near to dodging the bullet with Microsoft vs the USA. But in the immortal words of Gomer Pile; “SURPRISE SUR PRISE”, thanks to nine States Attorney’s General the anti-trust story just will not go away (hey shall we start a collection for Billy Boy)…….

In Segment Two- CARP and Other things that PISS u s off or What else does Washington have in mind to KILL the internet (or in this case webcasting)

We are joined tonight by another webcasting indus try maven Paul Jones, to discuss the ongoing controversy behind CARP or “the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel” and how they are going to create regulations that will mandate a “rate schedule” dictating the minimum amount of money that a webcaster will be required to pay to the holders of music copyright.

TLS is NOT against the music artist or creator of the music getting compensated. We are against our governments continued attempts to legislate one ki nd of business into a protected status, and eliminate the possibility of the development of new innovation and new business models. This is an absurd idea that you can turn back the development clock. If this kind of regulatory garbage was in place 00 years ago, the Automobile would have been declared illegal.

Tonight, Paul Jones will use his many years of webcasting experience to help us sort through the CA RP issue. Although often mistaken for other unreconstructed relics of the failed social policies of the Sixties, Paul Jones is the Director of ibiblio .org, a project that includes the Site Formerly Kn own as MetaLab.unc.edu and SunSITE.unc.edu, The Public’s Library — a large contributor-run digital library — and home to four streamed radio station s (WCPE – Classical, WXYC and WXDU – College and W UNC – NPR). In addition to, or complimenting. his work with ibiblio, Paul is a member of the faculties of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Scie nce at the University of North Carolina. Jones is author of recent articles on digital libraries in Communications of the ACM in May 200 and February 2002. Jones has an additional on-going research interest in Open Source and Sharing Communities and Information policy issues as well as being an actively publishing poet. Paul is the editor of the Internet Poetry Archives, published by UNC Press and a contributing editor to the Heath Anthology of American Literature. He personal web site is located at http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/Please join us on the show, and check our IRC Chat(irc.thelinu xshow.com #linuxshow).

Remember tune in at 6pm pt, 7pm mt, 8pm ct, and 9 pm et.

Catch the Linux show at www.thelinuxshow.com

Ian Bell writes “Designtechnica reviews ATi’s new All-In-Wonder 8500DV. This new card has the graphics core of the Radeon 8500 but with countless multimedia capabilities. It has an integrated TV tuner in it with HDTV support, DVD hardware decoding, two firewire ports and SPDIF output for Dolby Digital AC3 sound. What is so cool about this card is that when added to an HTPC (home theater PC) it theoretically can replace your VCR, DVR (digital Video recorder), and DVD player. It even has Guidestar plus TV guide programming built in. This is one of the best all around video cards on the market right now. Here is the review.”

Frapazoid writes: “Against it, of course. There are about 165k signituures last I checked. http://www.petitiononline.com/ SSSCA/petition.html.”

copal writes “Interface WM v.0.1.1 is now available. Interface is an X window manager written in Objective-C, designed to be ICCCM and EWMH compliant, yet optimized for use in a pure GNUstep environment.”