The Scribus program is making great strides in becoming a solid desktop publishing application. If you’re stuck using Windows because of PageMaker or Quark, check it out! Interview with Scribus Team.
Frank Neugebauer has written a step-by-step set of instructions to install OpenExchange in Mandrake Linux. OpenExchange is a groupware server providing similar functionality to Microsoft Exchange, only with many more features.
The CRM software mentioned in the book, currently in use by the author, is now uploaded to a Subversion repository. It’s mostly the Anteil CRM package modified to strip out the C database abstraction library. The code is quite ugly, and installation is not easy at this point.
The author of the book, John Locke, has forked the Anteil package and is now developing it under the name Retriever CRM. Many of the features do not work at all, and you’ll find several ugly bugs if you go very far. We would like to integrate the package to use LDAP as a back end for storing contact details, so that the data can be accessed from other programs. This is a very early call for developers–if you would like to be involved, leave a comment below!
You can download the code using a Subversion client from the following URL:
http://opensourcesmall.biz/svn/retrievercrm
Coming soon: a wiki and mailing list to coordinate development.
Con Zymaris has written a cogent essay about What the open source industry stands for. A particularly clear passage: “Open source licenses are not anti-commercial; they are anti lock-in.”