WorkshopLive.com is a virtual music school that features dozens of professional instructors teaching lessons online for all levels of expertise, in guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. When WorkshopLive was in the early stages of development, the company had limited funds to devote to hardware, software, and human resources, so CTO Marilyn Hoefner decided to give open source software a try. "We’ve been extremely happy," Hoefner says.

As hordes of European Java programmers descend on the JavaPolis conference in Belgium in mid-december, the developers of XWiki hope to turn heads with their "second-generation" wiki software that includes experimental integration with the Google Docs spreadsheet module.

XWiki faces formidable competition, though. JavaPolis’s own site runs on the competing Confluence platform, said by its developer to be in use by more than 4,000 organizations; XWiki’s clients number in the hundreds. Confluence has its own spreadsheet plugin that interfaces with EditGrid rather than the ubiquitous Google Docs. XWiki hopes Google integration will be the killer plugin that raises its profile as an enterprise wiki.

Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get. Though of no use against actual insects, Mantis is great for the other variety, since it lets end users report bugs or suggestions, and gives developers a full workflow solution so bugs can be assigned and progress on them checked until eventually the problems are fixed.

You can think of Kile as an IDE for the LaTeX document layout system. Instead of requiring you to learn a considerable amount of markup language, as LaTeX itself does, or providing you with a graphical interface that hides you from the complexity, as Lyx does, Kile automates the process of working with LaTeX while keeping the markup visible. This arrangement makes Kile an ideal way for beginners to learn LaTeX, as well as a convenient and efficient way for more advanced users to work with LaTeX.