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. 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 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? Biblioscape?) 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.

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3 Responses to Ecco open sourced?

  1. Daniel says:

    For note taking Tomboy’s pretty good.

  2. acb says:

    Maybe, but I flinch from a program whose “webiste”:http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/ says The newest release (0.2.2) has lots of great changes and many bugfixes, including …

    Ecco is up to 4.03, and it works really solidly. I admit that wiki-like linking, which Tomboy offers, would be good. But it’s no substitute for the speed with which you can make informative and useful grid layouts in Ecco.

  3. Daniel says:

    Guess so, but you won’t get much better on Linux.

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