A year or so ago I had an account with Basecamp, the very successful project management system that spawned Ruby on Rails. I really liked it but the project manager at work didn’t so it kind of fizzled out and eventually I cancelled the $99/month account that we had.
You can try Basecamp for free on a single project and I’ve used it on and off since then, but it’s not been ideal for me to use a hosted service. I tried a number of other products like dotproject. Yesterday I came across a Digg article about activeCollab, it is a GPL licensed Basecamp like project management tool currently in Alpha release.
It requires PHP 5 which I didn’t have on any machine as it seems each of my machines has some code on that only works on PHP 4 but I did a quick install of it on a VMware machine and fell in love with it then put in the effort to fix up a PHP 5 on one of my servers. It is great, even in its Alpha state it is usable and reasonably bug free. I came across one error in tasks which I sent a patch about back to the authors other than that it works a charm.
Click the screenshot below for a view of it, or grab it from http://www.activecollab.com/
