I’ve been using activeCollab for a few months now. It’s designed as a basecamp clone. It has some things missing, for sure, but it has been useful to me. I had hoped to more actively use it once the new version came out. However, that won’t happen.
activeCollab is going commercial. It seems to me that they could learn from the other successful projects out there – the really successful projects are supported by a wide variety of methods, whether it be a support model, a nonprofit foundation model, a hosted model, and others. In fact, pretty much every open source project that has gone commercial, or had a change in license, caused a fork, pretty much killing the original (like Mambo, or XFree86.) They have had an active user community, many of which, I imagine, are going elsewhere.
Luckily, there is ProjectPier, which is a fork of activeCollab, and will remain open source. I’ll be moving from activeCollab to ProjectPier soon.
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That’s sad. The major problem I found with ActiveCollab wasn’t open source vs. not but the fact that it wasn’t getting updated very often. I couldn’t figure out whether the project was dead or not. Now I know.
I don’t like the way Basecamp is set up. I use Wrike; it’s built differently and seems to work better for me. Check it out http://www.wrike.com/. It’s commercial, but it’s just $5 per month, so I don’t regret the money I send. It gives me much more. They also have a free version, I started with this one, than upgraded.
I’d be interested to see what you think of Zmanda’s approach — we have absolutely no intention of triggering a fork of Amanda, and do a pretty good job of supporting community users without badgering them to buy our enterprise version. Almost all of our development work goes into the community version. I think we’re pretty close to the model of Intel or Red Hat’s contribution to the Linux kernel: Zmanda pays folks (like me!) to develop open source software.
You could add a few more OSS apps to your list. Xen comes to mind. Zend seems to have done a pretty good job maintaining PHP while also doing business. I wonder if there’s more to learn by comparing several “good” vs. “bad” companies.