Ilija Studen, a developer from Serbia, has released a free clone of the popular project management service Basecamp. Studen’s product is called ActiveCollab and has been down since blowing up on Digg. Though the site is available only intermittently now, that’s not of a lot of consequence because of its service model. ActiveCollab is a PHP/MySQL tool that users download and then install on their own web servers. The end result is a free, open source and web based application.
Studen says he first got the idea of open sourcing his project from a discussion in April on Paul Scrivens’ blog titled “Being 37Signals for Free.” Studen claimed he had created such a product in that conversation and has now returned to update the thread with news of ActiveCollab’s launch.
The creators of Basecamp, 37Signals, have enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the world of high quality, low-cost online project management software. Though the company is widely loved, Studen’s clone could pose a threat to their subscription based business model if it turns out to be of high quality. The company offers a variety of popular online tools, but this is particularly interesting because of the company’s role as one of the key though-leaders in the development of Web 2.0 business models.
Here’s my $.02
Read the ebook 37 signals put out about “Getting Real”. They know what the hell they are talking about and their method can be applied to any business model. Judge a person or company on what they do, not what they “say” they will do. I trust 37 signals to provide a solid and reliable product. Maybe not every feature I want but a great project mgmt/collab tool.
Basecamp is an overhyped crap.
Good job, Ilija
What about getting basecamp on your own server?
We are very-very-small company and have a basecamp clone (fnuctionality and same user interface) for internal use. We are considering releasing it, but we are not sure about the business model to follow.
It has some great stuff like multilingualism and we are now adding email-integration a-la-gmail.
Would you be happy to run your own basecamp on a cheap PHP4 server?
Is there a market for that?
How much would you pay for that?
Do you think an Open Source model like SugarCRM can be profitable for us?
By the way, it’s not based on ActiveCollab it uses a Rails-like framework but on PHP
Can we a demo or screenshots of your basecamp clone? We can have some ideas for your
regards
Another excellent site is fmyi.com they offer a full featured free version that never ends. I haven’t used basecamp before, but fmyi is quite intuitive and has been increasing its AJAX usage to reduce page loading times, as well as using colored text links, instead of using image buttons.
I would say the best free alternative to basecamp is a similar online project management tool called SantexQ