Why Open Source the Client?

I'll give some history on this. At my employer, we were implementing our process using agile practices modeled after Extreme Programming. We used sticky notes to track tasks, but turned out it didn't scale too well with the number of projects we were dealing with. We tried a couple tools and evaluated others, but I didn't particularly care for any of them for our needs.

At that point, I decided to write my own tool with the basic functionality that could be used within our process. After about 6-months, the tool matured to the point that I released it on SourceForge in January 2006. As development continued, I couldn't really justify the time I was spending on the project to my family and so I planned to revise the license and distribution of AgileTrack.

In January 2007, that result of those changes was that the client remained open source as before, though it depends on the AgileTrack model for all of the data storage requirements. The model provides the security, persistence, and limited business logic, and is distributed with per-user licensing restrictions.

The separation of the client and server code acts as a very simple license-enforcement scheme. I believe that it can be beneficial for users to have access to the source code of the applications they run, and try to support that philosophy.

The interface layer between the client and server is simple by design. It is designed to have an interchangeable persistence layer that could potentially be integrated into other tracking systems. Such integrations have never been pursued, but remain very feasible. I'd be quite happy to assist anyone to integrate AgileTrack with another system.