In fact, it's what Microsoft shamelessly copied (badly) to create .NET.

It's Java. Java's libraries and APIs are increasingly being opened up by Sun; they see the benefit in avoiding proprietary lockin (and differentiating themselves from MS). Eclipse is an open source development envionment which is a dream to use, written in Java and designed for Java development but usable for non-Java development also. It can scale from small single-developer projects with a few source code files in a source directory on a hard drive to big collaborative development efforts with version control on a separate server hosting the code, and fairly transparently connect to the version control system in the background.

And everything tends to be well-documented, particularly library code, with Eclipse providing documentation browsing functionality as well as fully featured editing capabilities for code, including folding up structures you're not working on, syntax highlighting, sophisticated search and replace functionality -- you can search for all occurrences of a specific variable "foo" for example -- not all occurrences in the code of "foo" as a substring or as a word, but all occurrences of a specific variable, that loop index in that method body, ignoring other variables in other scopes also named "foo" and the method "foo()" in that class over there. In fact, Eclipse actually parses and understands the code (at least when it's Java code) and can alert you on the fly to any error the compiler would catch, provide other helpful warnings and hints, and of course navigate to anything of interest. You can jump to the source code for a method or class from any reference to it (including, if you have the sources, library code and other developers' code and third-party code) and there read the code itself, the doc comments, or whatever. And it has a smart autocomplete, which also uses the code awareness to find a good fit based on the types of values and the like. "Organize imports" is also useful, aside from a minor bug or two.

And I hear equally good things about other Java-centric development environments, particularly NetBeans.

Microsoft intended .NET to be the Java-killer, after their earlier Java-pollution efforts got them into trouble. Now it looks like Sun is figuring to make Java the .NET killer instead.

On other points of the original article:

• There are now color management capabilities for open source image manipulation tools, including the gimp.
  
• Linux increasingly looks viable in the office to me. Ease of use with Ubuntu is high enough that there should be little loss of productivity from its use, and even that would be temporary as employees learned the new system. And it is a small cost compared to staying with M$ auditors knocking on the door, M$ lawyers threatening, and M$ bill collectors sticking their hands in your pockets for "software assurance" <gag>. The major productivity applications are now available as Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc.; giving you email, Web, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and so on, and the all-important ability to read all those MSOffice documents you receive. All without the MS upgrade treadmill. It's actually at home where Linux remains semi-problematic, as you need a Windows machine to run games. This is clearly not a problem in the office, and in fact bosses will probably LOVE that putting Ubuntu on all the office PCs will cut down on lost productivity to Freecell and Minesweeper, not to mention the latest big-name FPS or Warcraft game. Well, they'll have to remove whatever Freecell and Minesweeper clones came with the distro they used. (And usually there's no lost productivity anyway; employee gaming is usually after hours or when the employee would be otherwise totally idle with nothing useful to accomplish anyway. Still, bosses will love it.)

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