Allegedly, the first software support tool for project management was developed by Datasaab for their computer D21 in the early 1960s. It was tailored to support the PERT model. Nowadays project planning software is widely used and abused.
To make things worse, many packages offer advanced visual formatting capabilities, which make it possible to produce nicely-looking but completely nonsense documents.
Many packages also offer e-mail integration, which encourages automatic assignment of tasks and due dates. This universally leads to counterproductive, date-driven behavior (see: critical chain) and may contribute to improper setting of team members' performance expectations.
MrProject -- was a part of GNOME, http://mrproject.codefactory.se/ but now MrProject has been renamed as Planner (See next entry). There is no new development on MrProject and all new development is now done on Planner.
Planner -- a GNOME tool for planning, scheduling and tracking projects. This evolved out of the MrProject code. The current developers of Planner include the original developers who now work for Imendio http://planner.imendio.org/ Planner uses an XML file format.
KPlato -- a project management application KOffice suite (in early stages of development), http://www.koffice.org/kplato/
Project/Open -- open-source, internet-based "Project-ERP", with an emphasis on project collaboration and financials, http://www.project-open.com/
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Allegedly, the first software support tool for