February 21, 2003

Headlines often tell the world what university researchers are 
accomplishing after long and arduous  years examining cures for diseases, 
alternative methods of power generation, and new ways to rehabilitate the 
banana. This week, the larger metropolitan dailies may not pick up what 
we've found as their page-one news, but we really don't care. The 
Post-it note from openBench Labs is good enough for us: Unison, an Open 
Source file synchronization tool from the University of Pennsylvania's 
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, is software that IT departments 
can put to very good use.
 
See what happens in our openBench Labs LAN scenario where we construct 
a Windows-centric environment complicated by a laptop running Linux and 
Open Office, in order to assess Unison's performance in handling the 
relationships in transit. 

Also in the spirit of good user-level tools, Njet Communications is a 
young company with a nifty platform for developers in the name of Anvil, 
which promises to help build web application projects with only a third 
of the time and effort of traditional ways of Java development. 

Read how Anvil's pioneers decided to do some serious business homework 
on how to make money with Anvil, coming up with a business name, Njet, 
a business model, and licensing decisions that make Njet's founders 
poster children for business advocates of Open Source. You just have to 
like a company that says Njet to .net. 

You can click http://www.open-mag.com/2125624141.htm to go straight to 
the subscriber home page and story links. And remember to send a copy 
to your friends mired in proprietary systems.

Regards,

The editors of Open magazine