OpenProj 1.0 is now available

In August last year the company Projity (http://www.projity.com/) announced the second beta version of the desktop application OpenProj (http://www.openproj.org). Today Projity released the first 'real' version of the same application.

It is very nice to see a serious competitor to Microsoft Projects and I am looking forward to look closer to the details in the application functionality one of the comming days. According to the website I can expect to find Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and even more.

For now I will just note a few details:
The application is open source, and this is of cause positive, because it gives us users the safty we need, because we can download the source code and find how the file format is designed. But the application uses a binary fileformat (.pod) for storing the project information. It is possible to export the project information in Microsoft Project 2003 (XML) file format. It would be nice if the native file format was xml based and perhaps based on some kind of standard file format.

The application is based on Java code and is not depending on a single software platform or operating system. It has been released for Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows.

The open source license is a so called Common Public Attribution License Version 1.0 (CPAL) witch is approved by OSI https://www.eu.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?cpal.

All together I find this initiative very nice, but I don't think this is the great revolution for now. If the company can establish a solid user community that can take some of the mising details, I think this could grow over time. I would like some more user documentation and mayby a few example projects to download.