is there a good alternative to Basecamp?

"belligerent brand of narcissism" is so very true. I:m planning to devlop my tool in 6 months from now, with ALL prinical things required on the 37 forum, that have been left never answered.
Seen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_... ?

The 37signals team is far from belligerent or narcissistic. Some may see their refusal to satisfy every whim presented to them regarding product or UI updates/changes as belligerent, but I just see it as them maintaining their vision for what they see for their product, without trying to bend in a million different directions. And no matter who (or what company) makes it to the top of their game, there will always be, by default, a number of people (or companies) who read too far into personality and cast wide-sweeping generalizations. In my opinion, I don't think any of us could survive at that level without a healthy disregard and a bit of attitude at times. So, in answer to the initial question above: Given that Basecamp is the best PM system out there for the things it accomplishes, I do believe for the things it does not accomplish, such as an on-board Reports function (and 37s often posts 3rd-party reporting apps...odd that they feel it unnecessary to offer this functionality, but are so quick to point out other companies able to fill this customer void, if only they are willing to spend more time and/or money and/or aggravation) you would be better served with a program such as DeskAway, which offers reporting across all projects, as well as reporting of any one individual's activity across all projects with which they are involved. Think of the implications of this. Imagine that you have even 15-20 projects under your management, with any given number of in-house employees, contractors, sub-cons, etc. With DeskAway's reporting features, you can very easily see what projects contractor #12 is involved with, how many outstanding Tasks he has across all his projects, how many issues he has assigned to him, the number of milestones he has been allowing to lapse, and how soon you need to terminate him. This is an arduous task, at best, using Basecamp. Now, of course, you must remember, 37s designed Basecamp with the small business in mind...a few projects...small team interaction, and so they continue to meet the needs of this constituency (and many large-scale clientele as well who don't seem to mind the lack of an on-board reporting feature). So you can't argue with the numbers if you are going to criticize Basecamp...they're obviously doing a damn lot of things right, or they wouldn't be number one. While I personally prefer DeskAway over Basecamp, I will add that Highrise and Backpack are unbeatable for the things they are able to accomplish and I couldn't live without them.

So, 37signals...belligerent? No.

Narcissistic? No.

Gnarly and steadfast? Yes, without a doubt.

And we're all better off for it.

Merlin is a rather daunting program that can do all sorts of wonderful things with project management. depending on what you want to do the learning curve can be steep but, it can do an awful lot. one aspect I like (and one of it's more under-documented and complex components) is the ability to export just about anything in a project to XML and then run it through custom XSLTs.

I've only worked with the desktop version, but it also works over networks. if you're using OSX (which the desktop version requires), it works very nicely with iCal and AddressBook.

An opensource alternative you can use is Teambox, at www.teambox.com

Then there's always activecollab. Which used to be a true open source project, but now has become a proprietary one. The main advantage is you host it yourself and pay what you would pay Basecamp once and be done with it. You can also enhance it further if you like. They provide you with all the sourcecode at the time of purchase.

If you want to move up to the next level and still enjoy the UI style/ajax speed of Basecamp, try

TeamWorkPM.com

You will not be disappointed - we use it and love it

BaseCamp WAS great - its helped start this online simplified PM tool revolution .. but it been surpassed so much now - if ONLY the 37Signals guys started LISTENING to their user requests they would win a lot of the customer they are now losing to products like:

TeamWorkPM.com (our favorite by far)
CentralDesktop.com
DeskAway.com
GoPlanApp.com (ver 2)
ZOHO.com (Projects)

These are the other 4 top products IMHO.