What would it take?

This might seem like an odd question, but since it appears there is mainly just the one developer here, what would it take to get to the 1.0 release? USD$1000 and 1 month? $5000 and 2 weeks? $100 and 6 months? A new computer? Another core developer?

I ask because i know this isn't your day job, but if enough people donated or whatever else you need - beta testers, more developers, etc - then maybe we could get further ahead. Obviously alot of companies are also using aC so there could be several companies that might be willing to sponsor the development or something. FWIW i might be on both sides, i'm starting to utilize aC but am finding some missing pieces so i might be a position to do organize a little bit of sponsorship or I might be interested/able to contribute code (though i'm hesitant to start down that path without some sort of agreement with the current developer since there doesn't seem to be much documentation or other general devel community here)

What does everyone else think?

I must admit, i'm very disappointed by the response. First of all, my question was aimed to get some sort of specific answer to what "big time investment" it would take. $100,000/year? $1,000/month? a million dollars? In otherwords, my question could've been worded as, "what would it take for you to stop your current day job and concentrate on activecollab fulltime?"

Secondly, I just finished reading the other post, ( http://www.activecollab.com/blog/1/why-is-activecollab-free/ ), and I'm a little confused as well. Why don't you want this to turn into the "Drupal of project management"? (that would seem like a good thing) It sounds like your biggest reason is that you want to make sure that you can make money from this project - which is a perfectly resonable desire. However, I don't think that opening up the project to the community prevents you from making money. The Drupal project is even a good example because lots of people are making money from that project. In fact the general business model for alot of opensource projects is to make money by providing support/customization instead of selling the code.

I would also point out that the Drupal project is also some what controlled in its development because there are a very small group of core commiters (3 to be specific). They usually allow themselves and the community to decide the directions of the project, but ultimately it is their decision to decide what goes in and what stays out. Its not anarchy. I think the reason people haven't forked drupal is because the core commiters respond to the community and also because the plugin system is so good that it doesn't need to be forked, but that's a different issue. I guess the other concern here is that if you are not able to work on this project for periods of time, the community is not able to make any progress on their own and any serious issues will be forced to fork out of necessity. I think its perfectly ok for a developer (even the core one) to take time off or work on other projects, but other opensource projects are able to continue because they allow at least one other person to help control the code.

Your post mentions that you are quite busy now trying to launch this month, but I would really appreciate if you might consider these issues a bit more deeply. I also don't want to insult or attack you, so please don't take it that way. I'm just confused by some of your thoughts, and ultimately just want to see this turn into a really good project.

On a side note - its interesting that you brought up the Drupal project (which i work with and love). Part of the reason to prompt my original post is that there are a lot of "little things" as well as some fair features that I've been waiting on to show up in a new release. The lack of updates/progress has left me frustrated, and so I'm actually considering trying to recreate something like activeCollab/Basecamp as a module in Drupal. I ultimately wanted to be able integrate aC into drupal via the api, but since this seems so far away at the current pace I'm thinking this might be the better option. Btw - this isn't a threat just an observation, but as i mentioned before this project seems to have a huge userbase behind it and a development community waiting to get behind it, and i think the current situation is forcing people to develop on their own and is probably slowly leading to a fork.

Some interesting points made by everyone, and I would certainly be willing to donate if there was a target figure to get aC moving along more quickly (in fact maybe Ryan Cross and myself should put our money where our mouth is and click on the handy Donate button on the front page...!)

I can understand people getting frustrated from lack of updates over the last month, but the guy's been busy on other stuff, and I can live with that as historically updates have been pretty regular given that it is a one man show.

No plans to 'fork' here

Hey anianem - that sentiment was kind of where the original post was aimed at. If there was a target amount, i'd be much more willing to donate. For example, as i start using this more and more i might be inclined to donate $10, just because i like using it. But if i knew that if enough money was raised some sort of target amount, then it would be towards a more specific goal. Plus, it would make something like a corporate sponsorship easy to do. How do you go to your boss and say, "hey, i think we should give this guy $1000. Oh, it won't directly improve the software we're using but hopefully it'll help in the long run" That's a difficult persuasion

Also, @ kchrist, I totally understand the idea of too many cooks in the kitchen. I think having a small team is better than one man though. As i mentioned before, drupal has a 3 person core team.