Most of you probably have heard of, or used 37signals' Basecamp. It's a great Project Management tool, and i've used it on a number of client projects. It's a subscription based, hosted service with various packages based on number of users, features, etc.

After using Basecamp for a while i heard about ActiveCollab, an open source software package offering much of Basecamp's core functionality. What made it most appealing to me was it's cost (free) and it's self-hostable implementation. I'd rather install an app on my own servers and 'own' my data than rely on a hosted solution that could close its doors or kill my access to data at the flip of a switch.

However, at version 1.0, ActiveCollab abandoned its open-source roots and moved to a subscription based business model. That's fine and well, and I hope they make tons of money, but they no longer had much differentiation from Basecamp.

To my delight, ProjectPier.org picked up on a new fork of ActiveCollab, and is offering essentially the next version of ActiveCollab free of charge once again. Really great piece of software. It offers all the core functionality of Basecamp: Clients, projects, tasks, timelines, members with variable permissions, file upload / management tools and more. The one main thing that I've noticed it lacks is a time-tracking tool. You'll have to pick up a separate tool to handle that, and unfortunately there's a sorely small pool of quality open source offerings for time tracking.

In any case, ProjectPier is a PHP/MySQL based web app that installs locally, or on your own webserver. Installation was incredibly straightforward, and the UI is a piece of cake to pick up if you've ever used Basecamp. It's got 10 or so really nice themes to choose from, and since you have the code locally, you can customize it to your heart's content. Check it out, it's probably worth your time.