Leading items and editorials: Unix sucks, StarOffice is to be
released under the GPL, SCO may be purchased by Caldera, Complete
rewrite planned for Perl 6 and Linux in the telephony market.
“Unix sucks. Or, at least, that’s what Miguel de Icaza had to
say in his opening keynote speech at the Ottawa Linux Symposium.
This talk was, as he put it, “designed to insult everybody,” and it
may well have succeeded. Certainly Miguel, who has always been an
energetic speaker who is unafraid of speaking his mind, was in fine
form at OLS….”
“StarOffice is to be released under the GPL. Sun took a step
toward truly free software this week with the announcement that
StarOffice, acquired by Sun last year, is to be released under the
GPL. This is an interesting donation by Sun, especially when one
looks at what the plans for this code are….”
“Complete rewrite planned for Perl 6. At the ongoing Perl
Conference 4.0, a meeting of the perl5-porters list was held to
discuss Perl’s long-term future. As a result, Larry Wall and Nathan
Torkington announced plans for a complete rewrite for Perl 6.
Frustration has developed as Perl has become increasingly difficult
to improve, extend, and embed. The core will be reimplemented, to
improve speed, and they’ll try to take the opportunity to remove
“cruft” from the current implementation….”