Going Proprietary again
So while shopping for a new Timesheet application, last month we tried to use eHour. We tried, and have already stopped our evaluation.
Our requirements are pretty simple. A bunch of consultants need to be able to book their time on different projects. We need to be able to print out these timesheets for a customer to be able to sign and our financial department needs to be able to print invoices based on the time we spend for the different customers.
Apart from a rather itchy user interface, a really non straightforward way to add projects or even try to modify them it were mainly
little annoyancies such as not being able to print a timesheet if you only have 1 project you worked on that month, made us look again for alternatives.
Then we ran into this posting on the eHour blog. eHour indeed had fixed some of the annoyancies we had but decided to close their source again. Right end of story for us there.
So rather than being able to help out and contribute to a better product, we are now once again in the market to try our next Open Source timesheet app.
Comments
#1 Anonymous : Just in case the ehour owner decides to delete my posting
In lieu of "Forget IT!"
...no longer open source but JUST free...
How would I know you did not implement "call home" or "back door"
How could I trust you any more when a google search for "ehour" and "open source"returns 11 pages of links and I read that you just woke up in the morning and decided to change your act?
This is misleading advertisement, or is it not, Sir?
Would you eat a free banana you find on a bench in a park.
Depends on the city you live in, but probably not. You would be afraid of a malicious act. I am afraid to run your stuff on my network too, and rightly so.
I would not touch it not even as a trial but treat it as potential malware.
The concept of FREE may let yoy THINK that being your code you can install a trojan horse on my network? Or can you not?
You can be either a trusted organization like IBM, Microsoft or provide the
source and build.xml so anyone can do a code audit and than build from scratch.
In this field you loose the trust only once. The first time, because there is seldom a second time.
You say you were afraid of forks. I would call it branching. Fork is something else.
Take a look at Thinking in Java. PDF is free and still sold many thousands of copies.
Not to talk about Linux, Hibernate, JBoss. You may be too young to know how it all started and what bogomips are.
Was not anyone at JBoss afraid that competition will look under the product's hood?
The community could have helped you iron out workflow anomalies, which you can not detect on your own - only users having real life cases can uncover those issues.
To bring this to an end, you may want to add to your resume (CV) that you initiated an Open Source project that, when you felt it was taking off, you repudiated the GPL.
This will sound promising to your future clients.
#2 debwim : Maybe can this help
Maybe can this help you
http://www.project-open.com/en/products/#rep