ActiveState Workspace – Basecamp for developers

Yesterday Vancouver’s ActiveState launcheda pretty cool project called Workspace.

Workspace is an integrated project management service for software development. Our managed project hosting provides issue tracking, source code control, document sharing, and project planning features to help teams communicate – all at an affordable price. Workspace is also integrated with ActiveState Programmers Network (ASPN), providing your team with a variety of free and commercial resources.

Workspace is essentially Basecamp – 37signals’ dead-simple project management tool – for software developers. It promises to be an instant infrastructure for managing software development projects and eliminate the time consuming task of managing the development process. This is particularly troublesome for small development teams who’d rather focus their efforts on development than management.

Good on ActiveState. They’ve been around since 1997 and they’re the de facto leaders in enterprise distributions of Perl, Python and Tcl. With Workspace they’re passing on some of that hard-earned expertise to the development community.

Workspace beta runs through mid-June after which a tiered pricing system will be turned on however there will be a free version of the tool available as well.