OpenProj was developed at Projity by Marc O'Brien, Howard Katz and Laurent Chretienneau in 2007. It moved out of beta with the release of Version 1.0, on January 10, 2008. In late 2008, Projity was acquired by Serena Software. As of 2008 support for OpenProj and communication about development of OpenProj seem to have been suspended. There were actually regressions with a few commits to the CVS, There has been no improvement in the past 11 years, and it is no longer compatible with Microsoft Project. In 2012, the founders of OpenProj abandoned the code base of OpenProj and started development of a different implementation. The initial release occurred in August 2012. The name of the new solution is ProjectLibre
It has been downloaded over 4,000,000 times in over 142 countries. Three months after the beta version release, on SourceForge an average of 60,000 copies a month were downloaded. With a SourceForge activity percentile of 99.964, at number 15 it was listed just ahead of the popular messaging applicationPidgin. In May 2008 the total number of downloads on SourceForge reached 500,000.
Bugs
OpenProj has not been supported for over 10 years. Serena software previously issued a warning and asked users to use ProjectLibre. As of version 1.4, bugs in the software generally only manifest for users who are attempting more advanced features. For example, tasks may mysteriously start at a certain time, links show gaps, fixed cost for summary tasks neither sums nor is editable, etc. Sometimes these errors are solved by restarting the software, but others are persistent. Compared to Microsoft Project, which it closely emulates, OpenProj has a similar user interface, and a similar approach to construction of a project plan: create an indented task list or work breakdown structure, set durations, create links mouse drag, selection and then button-down, or, assign resources. The columns are the same as for Microsoft Project. Users of either software should be broadly comfortable using the other. Costs are the same: labour, hourly rate, material usage, and fixed costs: these are all provided. However, there are small differences in the UI, which take some adaptation for those familiar with Microsoft Project, i.e. OpenProj can't link upwards with method, inserting tasks is more difficult than in Microsoft Project, and OpenProj can't create resources on the fly. There are also several more serious limitations with OpenProj, the chief of these being the unavailability of more detailed views and reports typical of Microsoft Project. For example, though the fields exist for cost, there is no quick way to show them other than to manually insert them. This requires a relatively advanced user: someone who knows what the fields might be called and how to use them.
Licensing
Some features of OpenProj are limited to users acquiring a purchased license; for those users using OpenProj for free, a slightly limited feature set is provided. For example, OpenProj does not allow the in-house exporting of PDF output, though the usefulness of such a feature is questionable. It is possible to circumvent the reduced feature set using external software, though as with all paid software, donation or purchase is appreciated by the developers.
ProjectLibre
The original founders of OpenProj started to develop a complementary server for OpenProj in 2012, comparable to Microsoft Project Server for Microsoft Project. During development they realized, that the fact that OpenProj had not been updated anymore by Serena Software for years would become problematic to their goal, so they needed to first develop a significantly updated version of OpenProj.
