Gobe Productive is a well known and the most important third party application in the BeOS world. It is a powerful Office Suite. Gobe (the same developers who wrote ClarisWorks for Macintosh in the past - now called AppleWorks) is now looking for a larger market than BeOS has to offer, and version 3.0 of Productive will be first published for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. A Linux version is scheduled for development and release shortly after the Windows one. This is the world's first preview of Gobe Productive 3 (GP3), with lots of screenshots and a good portion of information about the upcoming product (a public beta version should be released in the near future too).

KDE Studio Gold is a full-fledged IDE for the development of sophisticated C++ applications - including the high utility features you expect from a modern development environment, such as code completion, dynamic syntax highlighting and popup function parameter lookup. Debugging is simplified by tight integration with kdbg in the IDE, and comprehensive documentation is provided. Version 3.0 is now available and shipping. TheKompany added a couple of new features to this final release, which includes an integrated Programmers Calculator and Font Viewer. Demo versions are also available.

IBM announced on Monday that it will donate $40 million of its software tools to the public domain in a move to create an open-source organization aimed at developers. An organization called Eclipse will make available some of IBM's software programming tools to developers to create applications for e-businesses and Web services. More than 150 of the leading open-source companies, such as Linux distributors Red Hat and SuSE, along with Merant, QSSL and Rational, will be part of the Eclipse community.

FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited is now certified for Apache Web Servers running Red Hat Linux 7.1 and the powerful new Mac OS X Server. FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited offers the same powerful database features found in FileMaker Pro 5.5, including two-way ODBC capabilities, record-level access privileges and more. However, in contrast to FileMaker Pro 5.5, it sets no limits to the number of Web Browsers that can access a FileMaker Pro database published on the Web.

The Norway-based company Trolltech is well known for their C++ and fully OOP Toolkit, Qt. Qt is the basis of KDE, but it is also a very important and powerful tool under Windows, MacOS/X and X11 developers. Qt 3.0 released less than a month ago, bringing some really impressive features, like the ability to build platform- and database independent database applications, greatly improved internationalisation and font handling etc. Harri Porten, TrollTech employee and also a KDE developer (mostly working on the javascript part on Konqueror) answers some of our questions.

The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, R4 (codename `potato'), has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution.

"Passport and Wallet users are going to be disappointed to learn that these feature-rich tools can't be used until MS fixes a little bug which makes sport of taking over someone else's account. Passport authenticates a user for access to his credit cards and Web site accounts and passwords, to make life easy for on-line merchants and shoppers, and hackers and identity thieves." TheRegister reports.

OpenBSD 3.0 is now available for pre-order from the OpenBSD web site on 3 CDs, for US$40 (up $10 from recent releases). What's new: (1) ipf is now replaced by OpenBSD's own firewall/NAT system; (2) OpenSSH 3.O; (3) The CDs are bootable on 6 architectures; and (4) disc 2 has a mystery audio track! Sales of CDs, T-shirts, and posters are the primary source of funding for OpenBSD development.

"We've already posted our (WindowsXP) review, and we've already posted some tweaks you can do to get your new XP system up and going. Now we're finally posting the one thing you guys probably wanted to see first - the numbers. Raw data on how this puppy performs." FiringSquad is up to the task to measure XP's performance on games, productivity and more.

Will Dyson wrote in to inform us about the brand new version of his BFS filesystem driver for the Linux 2.4.x kernel. His code is based on Makoto Kato's original work, while there is another, older, version of a BFS driver for kernels 2.2.x already available. These drivers are all read-only and they do not (yet) expose the BeFS's advanced features like attributes and indexes.

"Red Hat will release its version of Linux for IBM mainframes in the next 30 days, catching the company up to rivals who already have staked their claim in the niche market segment. The Durham, N.C., company's mainframe version of Linux will be sold along with services through the Red Hat Network, Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said in an interview Friday. The product would catch Red Hat up with SuSE and Turbolinux, both of which already have a version for sale." Read the rest of the brief article at ZDNews.

This week KernelTrap interviews John Levon, the author of OProfile and a contributer to KernelNewbies. He offers much insight into both of these projects, as well as reflecting on Linux in general. OProfile is a statistical x86 profiling system for the 2.4 Linux kernel, useful in understanding what percentage of the CPU is being utilized by different processes, including those in kernel space and those in user space. KernelNewbies is an excellent resource for people looking to understand the Linux kernel, comprised of a web page, an IRC channel, and a mailing list.

"Most senior engineers understand the technical details about what it will take to move Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD to support enterprise computing environments. What we don't often understand is what the actual competitive advantages of open source systems are, and what the open source communities need to do to help maintain these advantages." The author explains how the two major open source development models work in different ways: the Linux and the *BSD. Read the editorial at BSDToday.

"What got me to this state of indignation is a dawning realization that Microsoft is about to win again in a part of the business where they have no business winning. I predict that Microsoft is about to beat the bejeezus out of Java." Read the rest of the editorial at I,Cringely. Update: Read also the relevant article "The MSDN advantage" by Larry Seltzer on ZDNetTech.