A day before the death of the free CD shipping program, a "Call to Action" thread on the OpenSolaris Governance Board (OGB) mailing list howled for more information on Oracle's plans for the platform, and some suggested that the project should be forked.

Oracle has also tweaked the Solaris download license so that the OS can only be used for 90 days - unless you purchase a service contract.

The group claims that the project is "held up at Microsoft" and it's currently "unknown" when the release will receive its "final go ahead."

"Due to the demands placed upon us by industry lawyers to release the Mechwarrior 4 Free release we were forced to insure our Studio at a premium rate to meet the Microsoft standard," reads the announcement, adding that group's server fund has "run dry" and is currently being paid directly by staff.

There's just one problem - most of us can't, thanks to ongoing issues with Ubisoft's controversial new "always online" DRM.

On top of the general server error, individual users are reporting various instances of repeated crashes, freezing and hanging that prevent play, and which also appear to be network-related.

The Assassin's Creed II PC launch was plagued by bad press following DRM authentication failures, which Ubi put down to "attacks".

One of the more troubling patent rulings in the past year involved a Canadian company, i4i, that held a patent (5,787,449) that appears to broadly (very broadly) cover editing a custom XML document, separate from the presentation layer of a document.

Microsoft appealed to have the case reheard by the full panel of judges at CAFC, but that's now been rejected as well.

Given EA's serious problems with bad DRM pissing off customers, you would think that EA would tread carefully here.

On top of that, we all saw what happened when Ubisoft tried to require an online connection as a form of DRM. The game was cracked within hours of release -- and then the DRM servers crashed and were offline and slow for quite sometime -- pissing off all sorts of legitimate customers.

As of Thursday, users of older Firefox versions will start seeing a pop-up encouraging them to upgrade. The window will come with three choices: Ask Later, No Thanks, or Get the New Version. The pop-up will appear after 60 seconds of keyboard inactivity, which Mozilla called a courtesy toward users and their workflows.

In the press release announcing the push, Mozilla stated that more than 90 percent of Firefox add-ons are compatible with Firefox 3.6.

Their new DRM requires gamers to be online all the time when playing the game. Without an Internet connection the game simply won't work.

Silent Hunter 5 was released on Tuesday and just a few hours later a cracked version of the game was published on many file-sharing sites.

The end result will be that the pirated version of the game will be more appealing and less restrictive than the actual retail product. Thus, the DRM is encouraging and increasing piracy instead of putting a halt to it.

Microsoft's server and tools chief Bob Muglia has chided Oracle for peddling a return to "1960s computing," accusing its rival of going against industry trends and backing a dying and expensive operating-system architecture.

He knocked Oracle for going down a vertical route of integrated and proprietary hardware and software that would deny customers choice and take us right back to an age that was anything other than golden and was renowned for just one thing: stagnation.

Muglia also slammed virtualization rival VMware for exaggerating the cost savings from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Even if you are running a legitimately purchased copy of Windows, your system will check-in to make sure there's no funny stuff going on. If there is, you will be downgraded to non-genuine status, your background wallpaper will default to black and you will have to prove to Microsoft that your copy is genuine or buy another one.

Quite why Microsoft is delaying the rollout of this update in the Middle Kingdom remains unclear given that China is the country with the highest rate of counterfeit and hacked versions of the Vole's software.

According to Alex Handy at SDTimes, Facebook is set to make some kind of major announcement regarding PHP on or around Tuesday, Feb. 2.

Handy also said: "So, why has Facebook rewritten the PHP runtime? Because PHP is obviously too slow for their tastes."