bnordgren,
Thank you for your thoughtful input. You brought up so many issues that I do not know where to start, but will try to address all. Note that I speak on my behalf, and other OpenGoo developers may not necessarily agree with my views.
On the use of AC as "the platform"Marcos already explained the reasons for choosing ActiveCollab (AC) from the 'features set'-point of view. Also, it was written for the AMP stack (
LAMP or
WAMP), making it very easy to install (another plus).
This choice wasn't easy. The time spent researching for the platform may prove insufficient. But there are so many possibilities that it is becoming virtually impossible to evaluate all of them. Then we kind of went with our guts.
The (or at least mine) biggest concern was exactly what you point out: the community behind it. We wanted a pre-installed community and, at the time, AC didn't 'seem' to present one. But since the issue was so big at its own forum, we figured:
* Someone would fork it (Already happened. Look at
PP)
* We would fork it (Probably we won't need to, if PP meets our needs)
On Project-OpenProject-open looks very interesting. This is a topic of great interest to me. I never heard of them, and you could see I have taken a lot of time to
research this. In particular, I am convinced that
the future of ERP is on the Web, and that such systems will succeed only when built on what Marc Andreessen just called a
Level 3 Internet Platform.
Building/Using a Level 3 Platform is one of the goals OpenGoo should pursue.
On the other hand, Project-Open looks complex, rather old and, yes, it is not developed for LAMP, which takes many points away from it.
On programming in C/C++/Java/pythonYou call programming in C/C++/Java/python wasting time?? Dude, that sounds like a lot of fun!
On the last link and quoteLovely! Although a little old, the article you linked makes for a very thorough resource. And long! In fact, having taken the time to read it is part of the reason I took so long to answer you.
Now, by this time it should be clear that I totally agree with the paragraph you quote. But we did find two motives for making a new project:
1) There was no Open Source Web Office project that we were aware of.
2) There seems to be no relevant Open Source Level 3 Internet Platform for this kind of systems, written for LAMP.
Plus, you left out the immediately following paragraph on the article, which would be quite encouraging for us:
If you really want to be famous, then develop a core technology that allows one to easily create any one of these systems by merely modifying a configuration file. Most of these systems have broad similarities: they maintain lists of things that can be searched, categorized and updated. Only the labels on the columns are different. This is ideal for abstraction. Broadly speaking, workflow systems have this kind of configurability. But there are other ways to create the abstraction as well. Do it!
Hope to read from you again.