Software news

To read news about Amoeba (a newly freed OS), Sun's new free software website, IBM's new UNSUPPORTED ADSM client, Staroffice 5.0, and a possible port of QuickMotion to Linux, hit the link below.

Jesper Juhl informs us that the Amoeba Distributed Operating System is now available for free download with a pretty liberal license. Amoeba is a powerful microkernel-based system that turns a collection of workstations or single-board computers into a transparent distributed system. It has been in use in academia, industry, and government forabout 5 years. It runs on the SPARC (Sun4c and Sun4m), the 386/486, 68030, and Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/60.

Robert Herrmann writes "Sun is getting serious about helping people use free software on Solaris."

On the commercial side, an anonymous reader informed us that IBM released an UNSUPPORTED Linux port of the ADSM Version 3 client., so please don't discourage them by bugging them for support.

Telcontar writes "StarOffice 5.0 for Linux will be available by August 18. The English website has not been updated yet (will be updated today), but the German website says that more than 400,000 users are already registered for the latest version (4.0 with service pack 3). The final version will be released on September 30 and will have all features of the versions for other platforms. It is free for private/educationaluse. 5.0 will be available in 8 languages (soon to be 24), and StarDivision has just opened an office in the USA"

Finally, David Nedrow writes that Practice Corp makes QuickMotion/2 for OS/2: a Quicktime viewer which provides standalone viewing, plugin support and QuickTimeVR and is better in many cases than XAnim. Tom Harding at Practice has indicated that they have been looking at Linux as a target platform. So if you'd like to see a port send a pleasantly worded message to the developers.

(I've edited the comments for brevity)