(Was) Open Source Collaboration and Project Management
By Diona Kidd on May 19, 2007 in Industry News, Open Source
I just came across activeCollab, which used to be an open source collaboration and project management tool. activeCollab is similar to BaseCamp from 37 signals.
activeCollab is written in PHP, runs unlimited projects, supports tagging, global search (including uploaded files), comments, milestones and more. It’s currently free software and was recently completely open source. However, it has come to my attention that activeCollab has changed their licensing and is closing the source on their project.
If you like BaseCamp but feel limited by it’s features and business model, this is certainly an attractive option, if you don’t mind the closed source.
What project management tools do you use?
Has activeCollab such add-ons like Basecamp has due to Basecamp APi? activeCollab is a great tool, but I also use Springloops (for code collaboration and deployment) and you won’t find any replacement for that. Due to such apps it’s hard to tell that Basecamp is limited.
Szymon | May 20, 2007 | Reply
It doesn’t have plugin support yet, but that is on the ‘upcoming features’ list. Springloops looks pretty sweet, especially since it’s based on subversion and deploys code to servers. That’s something I’ve been looking into automating on commits (at least to dev).
How long have you been using Springloops? Do you have access to copy the respository locally, in case you ever decide to move from Springloops?
Diona Kidd | May 20, 2007 | Reply
I didnt want move from Springloops as it’s good subversion hosting which I dont want to do locally. I’m using it for 8 month now. There you have full access to your repository, you can do with it whatever you want.
Szymon | May 20, 2007 | Reply
Note that it’s no longer open source or free. The developper altered the licencing and only the bulky 7.X branch is now open source, whereas he’s releasing the massively rewritten 1.0 branch as closed :(
jeremy clarke | May 24, 2007 | Reply
Thanks Jeremy! Where did you find this information?
I guess I’ll need to edit the article. :(
Diona Kidd | May 24, 2007 | Reply
There was a couple of posts on the dev blog, namely the one here (which has a lot of comments). It’s annoying that he still hasn’t changed the banner or title of his site to reflect the switch from open source to user-focussed or whatever, as people who come and don’t feel like reading the blog leave thinking that the primary info is accurate.
Hopefully 1.0 will be a good product (I’m pretty sure it will be), and there will be a free crippleware version that will still beat basecamp at things like allowing lots of clients and projects (though it won’t have things like time tracking, which you’ll have to depend on plugins for, which could be okay if the plugin devs just rewrite those things and make the pay version pointless ;)
jeremy clarke | May 24, 2007 | Reply