Release 0.99 of the Open Source IDE SharpDevelop for the .NET platform has been released today. The most important change is a Forms Designer and Code Completion for Visual Basic .NET, another useful addition is the SharpQuery Database add-in. The Mono version of the free IDE, MonoDevelop, is scheduled for a first release in a few days.

CVS is a tool to record, manage and distribute different versions of files. In other words, CVS is a version control system. It allows easy collaborative work, as each of the contributors can work in his local copy at the same time, without fear of overriding each other modifications. It allows the recovery of past versions (useful for tracking bugs), the creation of branches (for experimental development or for releases) and more.

On Monday, the Subversion project is scheduled to release version 1.0 of their version control system, under development for several years now. Subversion was intended from its inception as the CVS replacement and it comes with many important features previously found only on commercial VCS like Perforce. It was designed for better remote performance, and it is multi-platform with a GUI/CLI front-end.

MacMinute reports that according to BusinessWeek's Corporate Scoreboard, Apple reported the largest profit increase of all tech companies in 2003. Apple saw a 552% jump in annual profits to $137 M.

Opera Soft. released Opera 7.50 Preview 2 for Windows and Unix with a lot of fixes and improvements.

Intel Corp. chief technologist Pat Gelsinger showed off the company's first reconfigurable silicon at the Intel Developer Forum this morning, together with a yet another way to improve the efficiency of the company's general-purpose microprocessors.

Not one to buck the trend, Mandrakesoft have been fined €70,000 and told to change its name by a French court after a case brought by King Feature Syndicate of America, who own the trademark of "Mandrake the Magician" There have been no clues yet to what they'll change their name to, but for those who can read French, there's an article by the french IT news site Le Monde Informatique here. Update: MandrakeSoft has a suspensive appeal that could last 3 years, at least, and until a new trial they can keep their rights and domain names.

Desktop Linux software maker Lindows.com released on Thursday a version of its operating system featuring support for Intel's Centrino chips for wireless notebooks.

The Y Window System Project have started while XFree86 4.3.0 now makes it in Debian Unstable.

It wasn't that long ago that SGI completely owned the media production space, but with Macs making headway, SGI have instead added MacOSX to the list of supported O/S's with their clustered XFS filesystem. Now Macs can share the same filesystem as the IRIX, Linux and Windows boxes, and get fibre channel performance at the same time.

As if the SCO Group doesn't have their hands full with the MyDoom worm, recent updates in the Linux lawsuits have caused quite a stir. The folks at Groklaw have transcribed all of the documentation in which SCO details the code they claim to own. But now it looks like SCO's argument, which is based on their definition of "derivative code," may be contradicted by AT&T, who not only wrote the original code, but wrote about this exact scenario in $echo ...in 1985!

Marcelo Tosatti released the 2.4.25 kernel, unchanged from the earlier 2.4.25-rc4. On other Linux news, this article gives an in-depth walk-through on installing Fedora Core 1 on a Dell Inspiron 8600 machine, with some tips for the 2.6.x kernel series as well.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b was released not too long ago, so FlexBeta decided to take it for a spin and see how well it competed against MS Office 2003.

The Open Source model – and by Open Source we mean products that adhere to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) guidelines – doesn't, and may never, work for many important software domains. All religious fervor aside, this is a reality because customers say so. We may want it to be otherwise, but the ultimate arbiters in the Open Source versus proprietary debate are customers.