Reviews and Ratings
Monodevelop is the best Open Source IDE available. Since the 1.0 release it has been very stable. The Stetic Gtk designer is a pleasure to work with. I haven't had a useful IDE with a working UI designer since leaving Borland's C++ suite back in the days of Windows-For-Workgroups and moving to the LINUX platform and Open Source tool. Monodevelop offers code completion, a class browser, and enough options to avoid dropping out to VI or make files. If you want to build a client-side application for the LINUX desktop then mono, Gtk#, and monodevlop are the premiere solution.
After a very long time considering and testing various groupware and collaboration platforms, including considering commercial solutions such as Domino/Notes, I started using OpenGroupware. It has proven to a robust and enterprise ready solution. This is not a glorified PIM with some collaboration trappings as most of the Open Source groupware solutions seem to be. It is a real competitor of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint.
While ohloh indicates that development has slowed, I don't think this is true. Incremental improvements are added regularly and the number of developers has also increased lately - but OpenGroupware is very complete and descends from a commercial product that was under development for seven years before going Open Source. So relative to the size of the code base there are few changes, primarily because this is a very mature project.
OpenGroupware's weaknesses are (1) rough and lagging packaging and (2) a web interface with a somewhat antiquated appearance. But neither of these impedes functionality.
There are also significant developments related to interfacing from both mobile devices and fat clients (including Novell Evolution and Mozilla Thunderbird) primarily via the GroupDAV protocol.
OpenGroupware provides an API for integrating with other packages - and one of the shops I work with is using OpenGroupware as a backend to a sophisticated CRM interface. The ZideStore service provides access to files and projects via WebDAV, and using either WebDrive on Windows or FUSE on LINUX you can actually mount your groupware server as a drive/share - how much more integrated can you get than that? File management in projects provides both versioning and lock/release.
For programmers the ZideStore service itself can be extended through the creation of bundles if none of the RPC mechanisms provide sufficient access/functionality.
OpenGroupware uses your existing IMAP/SMTP mail infrastructure, including support for vacation and server side filtering if your mail server supports SIEVE (Cyrus IMAPd).
The GNUCash app is an excellent and mature product. I've been using it for what must be a decade now. It is stable, feature-complete, and has a beautiful user interface. It is hard to make double entry accounting easy... but GNUCash pulls it off.
When my new openSUSE installed opened a Python file in Geany by default I decided to just go with it and see what it was like. It rocks! Code completion even works as well as can be expected in Python, the symbol/class browser works, and not stability issues. A very nice experience.