OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including road warrior access, home/office/campus telecommuting, WiFi security, secure branch office linking, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls.

The platforms supported are: Linux, Windows 2000/XP and higher, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

The project is open source and released under the GNU GPL.

There is an extensive tutorial about how to write extensions for Mozilla Firefox on roachfiend.com.

All the steps required to create an extension from scratch are explained with many examples and much code.

Using this tutorial it would be pretty easy to create little tools that improve your online-productivity. Examples could be a CSS viewer or a list of keywords most used on a page.

A new version of GForge, a popular branch of Sourceforge has been released.

The new features include

• Role based access control (instead of individually assigning rights)
• Better CVS integration (Task and bug IDs are recognized in CVS commit messages)
• Subversion integration
• Forum to email gateway (reply to forum messages via email)
• Tracker to email gateway (reply to tracker entries via email)
• SOAP web service for the Tracker, Task Manager, User and Group API

A wiki is still missing, but since it's open source it's just a matter of time until a wiki is pitched in.

Beate mentions a QT-KDE wrapper which allows to compile KDE applications natively under a Win32 environment.

Also, it opens some other perspectives:

• Building new, multiplatform apps using the rich KDE API
• Building applications that will work (look and feel) like other non-Qt and/or non-KDE applications in many graphical environments and configurations

The wrapper is released under the LGPL license.

OSDir.com reports that the OpenOffice XML format might become an ISO standard in the near future.

Open Database Transport Protocol (ODBTP) is a TCP/IP protocol for connecting to Win32-based databases from any platform. It is ideal for remotely accessing MS SQL Server, MS Access, and Visual FoxPro database from Linux or Unix machines. ODBTP is fast, efficient, and has many features that make it a quality Open Source solution for database connectivity.

ODBTP differs from unixODBC in that it supports ODBC but instead of being restricted to it, has its own protocol.

OpenScorecard is a strategic management tool implementing the Balanced Scorecard methodology. It supports both single and multiple client operation, and uses a transactioned database for data storage. It also includes a small database administration frontend.

There are several editions available, among which one is open source and released under the GNU GPL (only sourcecode available) and one is freeware (only a binary with local database and single client). The freeware version is good to get a quick overview of the functionality.

The Balanced Scorecard method is defined by balancedscorecard.org as:

A measurement-based strategic management system, originated by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, which provides a method of aligning business activities to the strategy, and monitoring performance of strategic goals over time.

OpenChange intends to provide an Open-Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 under Unix Platforms.

The aim is to provide an application which is able to replace current MS Exchange installations transparently.

Currently only the openchange-lib version 0.1 is available under the BSD license. However, the team notes on their website that a final version of the OpenChange server is targeted within one year.

Mono 1.0 has been released. The Mono Project is an Open Source implementation of the various ECMA and .NET framework technologies for Unix, MacOS X, and Windows. The project includes a compiler, a class library, and a CLI runtime engine.

Now there is an easy and stable way to develop open source applications using dot net even for other platforms than Windows.

The WHAT Working group was founded by Mozilla and Opera to work on the elaboration of standards for Web applications.

The three main specifications currently being worked on are:

• Web Forms 2.0, which defines enhancements to the Forms currently available in HTML 4.x and XHTML.
• Web Apps 1.0, which introduces features to HTML and the DOM that ease the authoring of Web-based applications (e.g. context menus, server-sent events...)
• Web Controls 1.0, which will aid the the creation of custom widgets.

The WHAT intends to submit these specifications to the W3C and other standardization bodies as soon as they are finished.

The Apache module mod_xslt allows to perform server-side XSLT transformations on the fly. It transforms an XML file using the style information provided in a linked XSL stylesheet and delivers the result to the client.

With the ability to distinguish between browsers capable of doing the XSLT themselves and the others and the outlook of a caching mechanism, the performance should be a non-issue.

In conclusion mod_xslt looks like a very easy and pragmatic way of publishing XML content on the web.

VisualStruts is a visualisation tool for Java Struts applications. It scans given directories for Java Struts files and parses them to show their relationships in an interactive graph.

The software uses JGraph for the visualisation and is released under the GNU LGPL. It seems to be supported and/or developed by PiroNet NDH.

Superversion is a very cool personal version control system written in Java and running through WebStart 1.4. The application is released under the GNU GPL.

Superversion is a very handy, yet efficient tool for people who work on one-person projects and don't want to invest their time in setting up CVS or Subversion just for themselves.

The major features include:

• Monitor file changes and show differences
• Commit & checkout
• Restore previous versions (selective undo)

SwixML viewer allows to preview Java user interfaces defined in SwixML.

As notified in the october 2003 issue of the Tech-Newsletter;

SwixML is an XML dialect which allows to describe a Java Swing user interface in order to build it at runtime

Using the SwixML viewer it is possible to quickly preview user interfaces written in SwixML at the design stage, in order to show them to clients or to make screenshots.

PearPC is an open source, architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator capable of running most PowerPC operating systems (e.g. MacOS X).

It is released under the GNU GPL and does currently run on Linux and Win32 platforms.

The following hardware is emulated:

• CPU JITC-X86 which makes the client system only ~40 times slower than the host
• PCI-Bridge
• IDE-Controller
• PIC: programmable interrupt controller
• Network controller (on Unix host systems only)

According to the author, Darwin runs well and MacOS X runs well but with some caveats within PearPC. However, this might be enough to use it for simple software testing purposes.

Unattended seems like a great help for any admin who has to look after a network of Windows boxes.

Unattended is a system for fully automating the installation of Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003, including the OS, hotfixes, and applications.

In fact Unattended is the open source answer to Microsoft's Remote Installation Services.

One major advantage of Unattended is that it can deploy Windows installations from a Unix or Windows server. Eventually it is even possible to extend the application to optimize it for a specific deployment effort as it is open source software.

The JGraph Showcase features an interesting paragraph about a company using JGraph in their Email Response Management software:

Our product, the XM-MailMinder (which is an E-Mail Response Management software) utilizes JGraph in our Business Rules Editor component (screenshot). BREditor allows to display and edit workflows of E-Mail processing.

XtraMind Technologies who publishes the XM-MailMinder is based in Saarbrücken, Germany

Here's an overview of the open source XML database solutions available at the moment:

	dbXML	eXist	Apache Xindice	Berkeley DB XML
License	GNU GPL	GNU LGPL	Apache Software License	Sleepycat open source license
Status	Beta	Alpha	Stable	Stable
Server Technology	Java	Java	Java	C++
Operating systems	Windows, Unix	Windows, Unix, Mac OS	Windows, Unix	Windows, Unix, Solaris
Supported XML manipulation standards
XPath1	No	Version 1.0 + Extensions	Version 1.0	Version 1.0
XQuery2	No	No	Planned	No
XUpdate3	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Interfaces available
C++ API	No	No	No	Yes
Java API	XMLDB	XMLDB	XMLDB	Yes
SOAP/XML-RPC4 API	No/No	Yes/Yes	No/Yes	No/No
WebDAV5 Interface	No	Yes	Yes	No

¹XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document recommended by the W3C
²XQuery is a language that uses the structure of XML intelligently to extract data from XML files. XQuery is a W3C working draft.
³XUpdate is a language designed for the process of updating an XML document. It is a working draft of the XMLDB Initiative.
⁴XML-RPC is an XML based Remote Procedure Calling which works over the Internet.
⁵WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning". It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.

catdoc and xls2csv are two simple yet practical open source tools to extract data from Word documents and Excel Spreadsheets on Unix and MS-DOS platforms.

catdoc extracts plain text information from word documents and xls2csv converts Excel files to easy-to-process CSV files.

Both are distributed under the GNU public license (GPL).

There is also a list of some "competing products" on the same page:

• Microsoft own freeware viewer. It probably is best of all listed in handling of Word format. (And only one, which can handle Word 97) Unfortunately, requires Windows to run, although I have heard that it runs successifully under Wine
• Laola, the perl library to read OLE files
• word2x much more elabodate than catdoc C++ program. It sometimes reads files, which catdoc couldn't and vice versa.
• wvware Elaborated system which parses Word files and converts them into something more interesting, i.e. HTML or LaTeX.
• xlHtml Converter of Excel and PowerPoint files into readable and processable form (html, csv, xml)
• antiword
• Spreadsheet :: ParseExcel Perl module to read Excel files.
• doc2xml Python script which reads post-97 Word files. Handles fast-save

This sounds like a very nice and powerful piece of open source software:

Libtextcat is a C/C++ library with functions that implement the classification technique described in Cavnar & Trenkle, "N-Gram-Based Text Categorization". It was primarily developed for language guessing, a task on which it is known to perform with near-perfect accuracy.

The library is released under the BSD license (i.e. free for any use).

Additional language fingerprints can be created by supplying just one document in that language to the library.

The only caveat to this project is that the documentation isn't really extensive but it might be enough to start with.

Here's a quick list of the most useful open source software sites:
General

• Freshmeat
  Open Source Software Announcements. Almost any open source project is represented on freshmeat.
• Sourceforge
  Project and community site which hosts a large number of open source projects.
• Savannah
  Similar to sourceforge, except that it's a bit more exclusive, as only GNU projects are hosted.
• Apache Foundation
  Besides being the home of numerous very interesting projects, the Apache foundation does also endorse some external projects which are really cool too (PHP for example). Especially all the XML processing related projects are quite neat.
• Tigris
  Similar to Sourceforge in function and philosophy except that it's way smaller (20-30 projects) and that the projects are cutting-edge. For example subVersion, ArgoUML and Binarycloud projects are hosted there.
• Hotscripts
  Directory of free, open source and commercial web-applications in the languages PHP, Perl, Python, C++, ASP etc. Can be mostly useful to find complete applications.

PHP-specific

• PEAR
  The PHP Extensions and Applications Repository features alot of nice and useful components to use in PHP applications.
• PECL
  The PECL is a sister project of PEAR and is focused on PHP extensions, that is compiled C/C++ modules that can add interpreter level functionality to a PHP installation.