Whats going on guys? Its 14.41 here (Brussels time) and 37signals web site is down - is this discussion bringing on a DDOS attack on them?

Anyway back to the discussion, my view is the market is wide enough for all competition, hell, we even let Microsoft participate.

One thing I would like to see though is several players in the hosted software field get together and offer a suite - all of their software fitted together with a single sign on.

I just explained why activeCollab is free and what group of people it’s targeting. If you wish take a look at the comments on this entry.

Is it ironic that Basecamp, Tada lists, campfire, and even 37signals.com are all down right now???

ActiveCollab has a limited audience. How many people seeking a Project Manager want to Manage the Project Manager?

David, I have no problem reaching any of these
http://www.37signals.com
http://www.basecamphq.com
http://www.backpackit.com
http://www.writeboard.com
http://www.campfirenow.com
http://www.tadalist.com

Everyone is missing the real story here. The story is how low the barrier to entry is for creating compelling web applications. VC’s need to watch this issue very very carefully. Creating web-apps that scale is now relatively simple - particular if the app is focused on simplicity (and so many of the web2.0 startups are just that). So how does 37Signals protect itself? I’ve posted my thoughts on the topic with this post.

Could everyone pleae stop squalking.

This is not a project management tool. It has project management tools in it. It is a collaboration tool. I for one am looking for a collaboration tool, like Basecamp, but I would never trust a hosted solution to this job because they have access to my information (as Google does for all if its offerings). That is why I want to install it myself and keep the competitive information that I am sharing in-house (or atleast for our eyes only).

Conclusively, I am interested in ActiveCollab in order to collaborate better with my firm, my clients, and keep collaborative information truly private so that I can share important information confidently.

37signals should be ashamed of themselves… taking simple ideas and turning them into profits. Horrible.

Looking great Illia thanks for the great effort and I love open source.
Combine this with open source cms joomla! and you can have your business running in minutes

The great benefit for me is that my private data is stored on my own server and I will be able to tune, tweak and style it like I want it to be.

Wim

Guys - Basecamp is far superior then anything out there. It’s time you all realize it.

- Jason

Hopefully this goes without saying, but that last comment “Guys - Basecamp is far superior then anything out there. It’s time you all realize it. - Jason” by “JF” wasn’t me.

Yeah Jason and MS Internet Explorer is too

Tunnelvision like this is what holds development not open source alternatives to commercial software.

Wim

To the real Jason, I was responding to the fake Jason.

Wim

Copycats often lack ingenuity, insight and genius. Basecamp rocks!

The only reason we haven’t installed this yet is because of the required upgrade to PHP5, which would be fairly significant for us (and isn’t a priority anytime soon).

If we do the upgrade, I could see us both moving to this *and* contributing to the project (if allowed). It’s a great idea, and is perfect for use as a self-hosted solution.

This is why business people need to be involved with technology purchasing decisions. Most people seem to be missing the big picture. Basecamp is $99 or something like that. Basically that is FREE!! After all, if your business problem isn’t costing you $99 per month, why are you trying to solve it !?!?!

I don’t know anything about this solution, but I have to believe someone is going to spend a few hours getting it setup and another few hours each month keeping it running. Those hours aren’t free.

Listen, I’m no basecamp fan. Frankly, I’ve never understood the hype. But, if Basecamp works for people and can purchased for less than $100 per month, there was not a problem to be solved.

Guys, why can’t we all be happy that there’s a free solid open source pm software out there that we can download and modify to fit our own needs? Thanks Ilija for making this possible!

I wouldn’t trust my project files, messages, schedules, lists, client communications/user experience and other personal data to an application such as this. I also wouldn’t want to have to install and patch the software all the time. That’s the beauty of a web-based solution. Less headache. More time to get work done.

I pay the dirt cheap rate of $49/mo to 37s and get a world-class product on top-notch servers and back-up systems. When you’re working on real projects with real clients and real money, that’s peanuts.

I think this a great project for all those self concious developers. As basecamp allows an easy to use product that clients don’t have to maintaine and keep up with. This project is great for everyone who hates to have their information on servers other then their own. I highly respect 37signals cause, I mean it does cost money to run and maintain server, and who wants to distribute a large amount of resources with no return? But, I highy respect ActiveCollab’s proejct as well, it allows for a great intranet service, usability, and stepping stone for all those startups.

@David and Jason “Competition is great.”

Competition is amazing;) you keep insulting your users intelligence!

You guys are way off. This project will have almost zero impact on 37Signals because it’s not a service.

It’s definitely worth the minimal cost to let someone else run the software for you and deal with all the infrastructure crap (backups/uptime/db maint/etc).

If ActiveCollab starts offering their product as a service for free (ad driven?), then it gets interesting.

Open Source Web Applications (Osswapps / Asswipes ?) will increasingly pose a bigger threat to various hosted services like Basecamp. I think everyone from 37signals to Google will probably be affected by it in some way. If I could install a Basecamp-like product on my own server, I will. I don’t care much about the $12/month. I was a paying customer previously. What I do care about is having the stuff on my own server.

I think I read Jason’s comment somewhere that their target market is the Fortune 5 million - small businesses. Folks who have a need for a web-based project management software, and who don’t want to / can’t go through the hassle of installing stuff on a web server. I think an osswapp like activeCollab would be a real threat to 37signals once it gets somewhat popular and web hosting providers like GoDaddy start including it in their list of easily-installable scripts.

The “story of 37signals” is really inspiring. I think the real business opportunity for them lies in:
- Monetizing RubyonRails.
- Developing and launching mass-market consumer apps. Think Big. The mentality of “profitable, small business” isn’t taking them in the company of Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Meebo, Google, YouTube, etc.

Good luck !

Guys, if you don’t like Basecamp, Jason, David or anything or anyone related to 37signals then move elsewhere. Don’t complain because you’re not going to sway anyone’s opinion except your own. Calling Jason a hypocrite, because 37s might be removing topics they seem fit on their message board, is childish. This isn’t a democracy, if you don’t like they way they run things, do it the capitalistic way - don’t buy their product.

Three things:

1. How can a 5 person team in Chicago have a monopoly? Perhaps a monopoly on the TechCrunch crowd (none of which are able to or want to pay for anything b/c none of them have any real business).

2. There are already plenty of “basecamp clones” on the market…some of which are quite good…and add value in differnent ways:

http://www.jotspot.com
http://www.centraldesktop.com
http://voo2do.com

3. If you can’t afford $99/month for your business you are a complete idiot. If you think its wiser to spend even 2 - 5 hours a month supporting your own hosted app then that means you value your own time (or your employees time) less than $100/hour. It will take you a MINIMUM of 3 hours per month to ’support’ activeCollab. I don’t care what you say. If you say it will take you less than an hour…well, you are fooling yourself.

I’d rather spend $99 then waste one hour of my time that I could have been monetizing with a client, spending with my family or doing something more useful with my time then ’supporting a GD software package.’

You people are absolutely ridiculous.

This is an interesting development. Obviously there is plenty of room for BaseCamp, ActiveCollab and the dozens of other similar offerings. All of the “this will hurt 37s” or “who wants to host their own app” comments are silly.

Fact is, the purely hosted app is attractive from an ease and predictability standpoint. However, I believe that a large number of companies will have a competency in running a basic LAMP installation and will prefer to host the apps themseleves for a variety of reasons including cost and control.

The current biggest obstacle of the host-your-own approach is installing updates.

Varun,

I’d much rather be a 37 Signals than Digg or Meebo any day of the week.

37S is one of the few Web 2.0 companies with a rock solid business model and has been minting money from its apps since before the “web 2.0″ buzzword bingo game even existed.

Just my $.02. Cheers!

varun, why would you want to install on your own server? I don’t understand this mentality. You’re definitely going against the grain with this line of thinking… why not focus on your core problems and let others do the non-core stuff?

I use Basecamp apps and they are now making them more a suite of apps then a string of useful apps. Campfire and Writeboards are integrated into Basecamp and if I could have a private to-do list and calendar that only I could see I wont be going anywhere. Even if they don’t integrate tadalist I wouldn’t go anywhere.

This open source app has potential but there is little to no support. You have to host it on your own servers, make your own backups, fix your own problems. 37s is a hosted solution.

Good luck to ActiveCollab!

wtf is a link to Paul Scrivens doing on my blog?

Hey - Basecamp offers a SERVICE - not a Software. It’s difference. You don’t have to do installs, upgrades, fixing exploits and bugs, manage the underlying layers - you just have to do your own work within your own project. There is already a lot of basecamp alternatives (more and less complex ones) on the net since years. Nothing new is here.

Phil: Ownership. Data is a key asset. While in most cases people would probably be ok with using hosted services and focusing on their core problems, in some cases folks would prefer having complete control over where their data / applications are based. For example, look at Wordpress. From their website: “WordPress.com is a project brought to you by some of the same folks who do the Open Source blogging software available at WordPress.org. WordPress-the-software has been incredibly successful and risen from a handful of users to the most-used blog tool in its category. However, as easy as we could make WordPress.org, there was still a barrier in that you needed a hosting account, a database, FTP, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms that make normal people like you and me dizzy. We wanted to bring the WordPress experience to a larger audience.” I believe 37signals is focused on this “larger audience”. Osswapps like activeCollab could be preferable to folks like me who have both the interest and capability to run it. But 20% of the market should not define how 37signals deals with the other 80% of customers who cannot/will not host stuff themselves.

Fez: Digg, Meebo, YouTube, etc….without any hint of a business model, are swimming in millions of dollars, probably are market leaders in their category, and have a good chance of big financial success in the future. 37signals, given it’s incredible reputation and credibility, is well poised for such success. I think all they need is 1 big, unique, killer idea, instead of 5 regular ideas, to propel them in the fast track of massive financial success. I just don’t think the extremely bright folks at 37signals and superstars of this Web 2.0 revolution, like Jason, David, Sam, etc are doing justice to themselves by working on ordinary ideas and having a small business mentality.

To me - the argument about free vs. paid doesn’t matter … nor does “maintaining my own servers” vs. having someone else do it for me.

For other people - those may be critical decision points. But for me, they’re not.

I work for a large 30,000+ multinational corp … I’d liked the idea of Basecamp for managing some of our internal projects, but the fact that it’s offered in a service-provider only model is a non-starter. Company confidentiality standards would prevent putting almost any project-related documents into their service. So - to the 37signals guys … think outside the box a bit on your customer base. Plenty of us would *like* to use your service, but your business model prohibits us from doing so.

I’ll be sure to go and check out activeCollab ASAP. Even if it’s only half as good - the fact that I can control and maintain the confidentiality of the data puts it well ahead of Basecamp.

DougT,
So you are saying that none of your 30,000 employees have their data hosted offsite?

Are any of them using Salesforce.com? And, besides, what sort of security do you have on your email? Are all 30,000 employees using PGP or Encrypted Email when they correspond with their clients, vendors, etc.? I doubt it.

How easy is it for your employees to just email confidental documents to anyone in the world?

I think people over-react to security. Its a viable concern, but its often not a warranted concern and usually just comes back to a “Control” issue with the IT Department or with a micromanager.

With Rails being so closely tied to Basecamp, it’s no wonder that there are weekly questions on the Rails mailinglists about how to implement something like Basecamp, and that there are loads of tutorials that explain how to make a simple todo-list.

I’ve personally made a software development oriented Basecamp-ish application in just about every web framework I’ve tried, and the one I’m the most happy with is written in Rails. Feel free to have a look at http://www.clockingit.com - it’s also free, but it’s not currently open source.

We’ve been using it for a few projects at work, and it’s more than enough for our needs.

I think it’s great that activeCollab has come along. On a side note, and just to add a bit of humor into these comments:

Hooray! Let’s all have a race to the bottom!

I run a hosted telecom service that is built in part upon open standards based components. I would not recommend open source software to most non-technical users. Very few server side OSS projects are remotely intuitive to a typical end user, and even if you know what you’re doing, some of them are a challenge to use. My experience has been that open source developers also confuse commented source code with clearly written documentation.

We’re all experienced developers over here, and rather than reinvent the wheel, we happily forked over the $20/month or whatever the rate is. Compared to our phone and colo bills, the cost for Basecamp is zilch, and we’re too busy managing our own product and business to deal with hosting a service like this ourselves.

So I don’t really see where the demand for this tool will come from. Maybe universities or bigco IT departments where people have spare time to burn or have to fight byzantine procurement rules. However, I don’t see small businesses or individuals rushing to use something like this. It took all of a minute to get set up on base camp, and it’s worked great for us since.

You can say the same thing about teleconferencing. In theory, companies could save a _lot_ of money by setting up their own Asterisk box and buying VoIP service from providers like Global Crossing. In practice, it’s a lot easier to pay a company like us to deal with this for them. If you’re GM and you can save millions per month with your own bridge, that’s one thing. If you’re a five person law firm that spends a few hundred per month on teleconferencing, it’s not worth the time to do it in house.

That’s not to knock on the developer. It’s great that people develop stuff and share it freely. Sometimes invention is its own reward, but I don’t think 37 Signals needs to lose sleep over this. They should worry more about someone like Webex getting into their space.

Brian McConnnell
Open Communication Systems / Radio Handi

I have been a subscriber of Basecamp for four years, and I think the development and release of aC is great. It will light a fire under both groups to innovate further. BC does have some nice features and I would be loathe to get rid of it, but in other instances some pretty bone headed decisions have been made around the UX. Requiring the User to enter time within the project section and not permitting it to be done centrally at the dashboard is one that comes to mind immediately. I can not think of anything more tedious and frustrating for the user except perhaps requiring the User to edit existing milestones one at a time instead of simultaneously. aC does not do this either, but again this sort of competition may get some people to consider broadening their “Vision.”

What’s with people pretending to be the 37S guys?

*That* is lame.

To Jason and 37 Signals:

I would hate to be you. Not because of this open source competitor but more so because you have to deal with all this nonsense in the first place. Thank you for releasing a good product. One that shows the time, effort, and care that went into it. I wish you all the best of success for all your hard work.

Basecamp is not the only solution out there, but it is the best in our opinion. There is always room for improvement for sure although the product is stellar. Personally I would be embarrassed if I ran a company that could not afford $12 a month for a tool that helps collab and communicate with my clients. Even the smallest company with the smallest projects should be able to raise up less than the cost of coffee per day to communicate with their clients.

Now ActiveCollab looks great. I just installed it and it’s powerful and nice. I equally wish them luck too. At this point I see no need to switch to something I already do.

Jason, rock on, and keep up the ego… be proud of your contribution… don’t let these commenters bring you down, they will go away soon… complaining on some other forum, hating on some other dude- no doubt and no worries.

What online application is perfect? Why all the negative energy put on Basecamp?
If you don’t like Basecamp, then use something else or build it yourself. What I can say about Basecamp is that in my educational organization, the end users “get it” As a technologist, I can assure you that we tried it out first. If our end users look at a online application and do not “get it”, they will not waste precious time to learn it! I am loathe to force end users to use a program that is not user friendly. 37 Signals have done their homework to enable the general end user to “get it”.

“I work for a large 30,000+ multinational corp … I’d liked the idea of Basecamp for managing some of our internal projects, but the fact that it’s offered in a service-provider only model is a non-starter. Company confidentiality standards would prevent putting almost any project-related documents into their service. So - to the 37signals guys … think outside the box a bit on your customer base. Plenty of us would *like* to use your service, but your business model prohibits us from doing so.”

It sounds as if their business model is working just fine for them, but your “large 30,000+ multinational corp” just isn’t their target market. C’est la vie.

Once again, it just goes to show that…

1. you can’t get too comfortable with one business model for too long in the Web 2.0 era;

2. Ruby on Rails is NOT the Second Coming, as quote-unquote “legacy” coders can readily create any kind of application they want, regardless of platform; and

3. open source continues to amaze, inspire and change perceptions.

That all said, I doubt 37 Signals has much reason to worry in the short term. I, for one, use BaseCamp and love it. I also don’t mind paying the relatively insignificant monthly fees for the support and continual progress. So, even though I’m “hardcore” PHP/mySQL, I may investigate ActiveCollab but otherwise won’t drop BaseCamp so long as it continues to be a world-class service.

My sweet wiccan aunt, you people are ALL a bunch of pathetic wankers. Comparing dick sizes over who uses 37squiggles vs. ActiveClap or whatever, denigrating other people for not making the choices you made. Get some perspective, people. There is no right way for people to live. Stop pissing on each other.

I’ve created a screencast (-voice + helpful hints) on the installation of activeCollab on a shared linux host (the most common case).

Size: 11 MB
Length: 8 min

http://www.sridhareena.com/200.....creencast/

My former employer (hint : black credit cards) would never have allowed me to use BC for some of our small internal projects. No matter what the price was. Remote=not safe.

If I would have shown up with an application like aC (but advanced Beta and not 0.1/alpha) I could easily have convinced my dept. to give it a try for smaller projects. If the product would convince, I am sure they would even support the developer financially.
Although our dept. was rather small (400 network clients) we ran several servers for our intranet. Why go elsewhere for hosting? Besides that we would have invested in BC as an application and not as a service.

To rephraze some comments here : ‘If your company can’t afford an intranet server better close your shop’.

This would be totally awesome… if I could figure out how to install the thing.

Check out this topic and this tool. Blogsen hacked installation and created small service website.

I’ve also created a screencast (with voice) that starts where Sridhar (Post #94) stops. Check it out at http://elifoner.com/63.

“The reason that Basecamp is number 1 is simple: it is perfect. I’ve used several in the past, none compare with anything made by 37Signals. There is more to a product than features. Its about design and thought.”

Uh, yeah right.

The reason Basecamp is number 1 is pure, unadulterated HYPE. These guys built a pile of crap with no features and tons of bugs and ran around the country charging people loads of money to get a dose of dot-bomb 2.0 hype shoved down their throats. 37signals model is to pull some unwashed pile of nothing out of their arse, hype the living shiznit out of it, promise features and fixes, charge you for it, use the money that they charge to fix the broken stuff and turn it into something that might be worthwhile. I dont know about all you people saying basecamp is perfect, but you must not have tried basecamp from the beginning, it was alpha/beta-temptware that had a handful of features, many of which were broken, and you got to pay to be on the hype train to nowheresville.

Watch any of their NEW AWESOME NEW INNOVATIVE things they launch, they are just stripped down, pale, milquetoast promises that use the vapid smoke-machine hype generator to try and build enough cashola to turn it into something useful. Has anyone tried stinkypad? Its one of the worst wikis I’ve ever seen, but you know what? I know tons of management yoohoos who think its the bee’s knees most awesome thing EVAH. Thats because they don’t know jack keroac and need to be spoonfed whats cool and hot, so they eat this stuff up and then make a holy stink about using it in any organization while all the techies who have used real wikis for ages roll their eyes…

To quote someone:

3. If you can’t afford $99/month for your business you are a complete idiot. If you think its wiser to spend even 2 - 5 hours a month supporting your own hosted app then that means you value your own time (or your employees time) less than $100/hour. It will take you a MINIMUM of 3 hours per month to ’support’ activeCollab. I don’t care what you say. If you say it will take you less than an hour…well, you are fooling yourself.

If you dont know what you are doing you might waste all this time. I pay someone $20/hour to handle this sort of thing. He got it setup in 15 minutes, because its a project in motion he *might* spend an hour a month on upgrading it to newer versions, thats not a huge savings, but it is a savings. What is more important is that we are going to invest an hour a month in helping development, because there are features that we want that we’ll never get in basecamp, and even better this code is open and free. I would never buy a car that has the hood locked that can only be serviced by the dealer.