Tasktop Does Agile Open

Tasktop is one of those companies that many of you may have never heard of. They are the creators of the open source Eclipse Mylyn and a leader in Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) developer tools and interoperability. Like many open source projects Mylyn is one of those that does not get anywhere near the press or attention that Linux or MySQL or some of the other big names in open source does. But tools like Mylyn and companies like Tasktop are meat and potatoes of the open source world.  These kinds of projects and tools are the lifeblood of developers and the quality and utility of these projects are why developers favor open source tools so heavily.

I had a chance to sit down and talk with Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and creator of the open source Eclipse Mylyn project.  In addition to supporting Mylyn, Tasktop has a commercial version which is called Tasktop Dev.  Recently the company also released Tasktop Sync which allows for the first time, organizations to sync their Agile Lifecycle Management (ALM) across different servers and agile products. Sync supports agile development environments from companies like HP and IBM in addition to various open source tools.

Kersten who created Mylyn has been a leading figure in the agile development world for some time.  He is a firm believer in the open source model. While many commercial companies have joined the agile revolution, open source tools are still a leading choice in the market. In fact in many of these type of developer “plumbing” type of markets open source is sometimes the only choice, let alone the best choice.

To me companies like Tasktop and projects like Mylyn are the true heroes of the open source movement. They don’t get the accolades or big money that some of the higher profile open source projects receive, but they make the IT industry go. In many ways they are the glue that holds it all together.

Supporting companies like Tasktop who are growing out of their pure open source roots is something that I think we should all be doing to encourage more open source innovation and investment.