Thursday, July 06, 2006
Open Source Clone of 37signals' Basecamp Released!
You're probably familiar with 37signals' hosted software product, Basecamp. It helps teams collaborate and manage projects. It's fast, simple, very easy to learn, and has some fanatical users. It's built using the open source Ruby on Rails framework, but Basecamp itself is not open source. In fact, you can't buy it in any capacity to install it locally, proprietary or otherwise. The only way to get Basecamp is to use 37signals' hosted offerings, some of which are free.
Basecamp's hosted-only status makes today's public alpha release of activeCollab, an open source Basecamp-ish application, very exciting. Yeah, lots of people are interested in talking about what this means for 37signals' business. But I'm less excited about having a free alternative to Basecamp (which I do pay for, use, and like), and more excited about having a local install ofBasecamp activeCollab. Does everybody want to administer things themselves? No. But once something goes open, it means it can be local, hosted, whatever. It means your data can travel with you as you shrink and grow, or need slight customization. When there's only a single implementation of a way to interact or store data, it can sometimes make people a little scared to totally dive in to things.
activeCollab is alpha, and they barely survived their Digg today. Some people have reported trouble installing it. Who knows how it will turn out. But I'm really rooting for them (That doesn't mean against 37signals, sheesh. Haters.) There are so many cool web-based applications out there. And they're really convenient and fun to use. I just think the next step here is having the same options with them that you do with other kinds of data. 37signals is great about letting you get your data out in some form. It's just a little less useful outside of Basecamp!
You're probably familiar with 37signals' hosted software product, Basecamp. It helps teams collaborate and manage projects. It's fast, simple, very easy to learn, and has some fanatical users. It's built using the open source Ruby on Rails framework, but Basecamp itself is not open source. In fact, you can't buy it in any capacity to install it locally, proprietary or otherwise. The only way to get Basecamp is to use 37signals' hosted offerings, some of which are free.Basecamp's hosted-only status makes today's public alpha release of activeCollab, an open source Basecamp-ish application, very exciting. Yeah, lots of people are interested in talking about what this means for 37signals' business. But I'm less excited about having a free alternative to Basecamp (which I do pay for, use, and like), and more excited about having a local install of
activeCollab is alpha, and they barely survived their Digg today. Some people have reported trouble installing it. Who knows how it will turn out. But I'm really rooting for them (That doesn't mean against 37signals, sheesh. Haters.) There are so many cool web-based applications out there. And they're really convenient and fun to use. I just think the next step here is having the same options with them that you do with other kinds of data. 37signals is great about letting you get your data out in some form. It's just a little less useful outside of Basecamp!
- activeCollab's page (kinda barebones today, after their Digg)
- I found this story via a thread on the Lussumo Community forums (home of the excellent Vanilla forum software, a very pretty, open source, multilingual forum)
