Ecco open sourced?

I can hardly believe this, but one of the most original and useful programs of the last fifteen years may finally be “available for improvement.”:http://www.compusol.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl for some time now Ecco has been given away free as a donwloadable binary, and if you haven’t tried it, do. But opening the code might make it much more useful.

“Ecco Pro”:http://www.compusol.org/ecco/ was, and is, the most useful information manager, project organiser, and generally intelligent dustbin I have ever found. It was sold as a sort of outliner, but, as Rupert once said, the only really outliner-ish thing about it was that the enter key didn’t work properly.

It’s still what I use for contacts and projects: it is superb, for example, at organising radio programmes. If the code is open-sourced, and legible, there is a rumour that Sun might assimilate parts of it into the OpenOffice project, which would be wonderful. There may well be programs as good on Windows now (“OneNote?”:http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010858031033.aspx “Biblioscape?”:http://www.biblioscape.com/) and there is almost certainly something classy for the Mac. But there is nothing remotely as slick and competent available for Linux, and it would be a help for corporate users, as well as real people.