The company started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and programming genius Justin Rosenstein opened to the public last week its productivity product Asana, a web application that allows users to manage teams and projects.
Moskovitz is listed by Forbes as the world’s youngest billionaire, being eight days younger than Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, owing to the success of the social networking site. He was Facebook’s first chief technology officer before becoming vice president of engineering.
Dustin Moskovitz wants the Asana application (above) to serve as “a home screen for work in the same way that Facebook is a home screen for goofing off.” (CLICK ON PHOTO TO VIEW LARGER IMAGE)
The project management application I use extensively for some of my tasks has turned its back on the open source beginnings that attracted me and, I’m sure, many others to it during its initial versions.
ActiveCollab is a clone of the popular Basecamp project management application. The main difference is that while Basecamp is a hosted service with various account levels, activeCollab is something you install in your own server and on which you have full control.
PROJECTPIER. The ProjectPier installation that replaced activeCollab in my webserver. I’m using the goCollab monochrome theme that came it.
The project management application appealed to do-it-yourself type geeks who wanted to host the data on their own and deal with less restrictions on accounts. Plus, it was free.
When it was first released, activeCollab came with an open source license and that was what attracted me to the project. I thought it held promise of being a very powerful and useful project management application if developed by an active community of users.
But the developer has decided to stop open source development on the project. Development will now be closed source, at least on the core features. The next release, version 1.0 due out next week, will also not have a free version. Your only options for activeCollab 1.0 are SmallBiz ($199) and Corporate ($399).
