8/3/2023 0 Comments Ganttproject free![]() The growth has never been exponential - the dream of the modern startup! - but it was steady for well over a decade. However, GanttProject was a good product, and the choice of free alternatives to MS Project was not so big at that time, so new users kept coming. We hosted a simple website on SourceForge and basically, that’s it. We didn’t do anything to attract customers and have never spent a single dollar on paid traffic. Well, provided that there is someone who pays you at your main job. You can just write code and build a great product. The good thing about open-source pet projects is that you have no stakeholders or investors, who are worried about their ROI, strategy, execution, traction, and all that fun stuff. Describe the process of getting the product out on the market We iterated quickly, published new versions nearly every week, and quite soon GanttProject became very popular. In the 2000s there were no self-contained application bundles, no application signing was required, there was just one vendor of Java Runtime and you could rely on Java being installed by default, yes, even on Mac OSX! So all you had to do was to build a JAR or ZIP file and publish it on SourceForge. We didn’t try to copy all the features of Microsoft Project or clone the look of Gnome Planner, an open-source PM tool for Linux which was popular at that time, but the basic features of such applications are really very similar. If you are just like Microsoft Project, except that you are free, you rock. Project management software is quite an established and conservative business, and the most requested or expected features are very well known. Take us through the process of revamping & designing the software. But working on GanttProject was fun, and it is still fun today, 15 years later. In 2007 I started an experiment with Google ads on the website and it turned out to be successful: the first month with ads generated about $6 (six dollars)! I had already started working at Google in a software engineer position by that moment, and the income from ads was quite negligible. However, I stayed and took over the leadership and administration. This happens to almost every open-source pet project with no big company behind. However, the source code was open, so I implemented it myself and sent a patch to Alexandre (those days there were no GitHub, no pull requests) and it was my first contribution.Ī few years later Alexandre mostly lost interest in GanttProject. I needed a command-line export, which was missing. I searched for open-source Gantt chart drawing software and found GanttProject. Most of us worked on Windows and used Microsoft Project, and I was the only one who worked on Linux. ![]() We tried to use project management software (read: Gantt charts) at my main job. I joined a few months later just by coincidence. GanttProject was started in the early 2000s by Alexandre Thomas, a guy from France, during his study at the University of Marne-la-Vallée. What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea? Quite far from the Forbes list, but not bad for a pet project. ![]() This, along with a few ad banners, generates about $3000-5000 monthly. GanttProject is free for any purpose, however, there is an option to pay-what-you-want and, to my big surprise, quite a few people choose this option. It is used by small and medium-sized businesses in construction, mechanical engineering, media production, and other industries, as well as at colleges on project management classes. ![]() ![]() GanttProject may be thought of as a replacement for Microsoft Project for those who can’t afford to spend $1000 on a Gantt chart drawing software. My name is Dmitry Barashev and I am the guy who is working on GanttProject, a popular free open-source project scheduling application for desktop operating systems. Hello! Who are you and what business did you start? ![]()
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