I have been wrestling with something for quite some time, and as of tonight, I am done wrestling. The path is clear and the decision feels good. (And you thought this was going to be a post about BarCamp.)

Actiontastic will be free and open source. The free (as in “free beer”) part starts tonight. The code (as in “freely available source code”) will follow when the overhead of a new team won’t crush the project under its own weight. Those with experience getting to 1.0 will understand what I mean.

Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale. I am not opposed to the idea of shareware in general and have purchased quite a bit of it myself over the past year. It’s just that shareware isn’t the right path for Actiontastic.

My plans for Actionatr are similar. It will still launch as planned at http://actionatr.com. However, you will be able choose the for-pay web service or grab the code and make your own. Thanks to the fantastic API support in Rails, your data will always be free and available as it should be. Add OpenID to the mix, and you can see how free cross-site collaboration might be possible. My hope is that enough people will use the hosted service to support the development of both Actiontastic and Actionatr, but either way the idea is just to build great software with great people. If there’s no business behind it, then so be it.

So, if you’re like me and have an almost physical need to build things and to be creative, be prepared — I will be stalking you (kidding!). I will, however, be looking for those with an interest in one or more of these things: design and usability, meaningful XHTML/CSS, Ruby, Rails, Obj-C/Cocoa, RubyCocoa, REST-based services, microformats, and OpenID.

Oh yeah, a non-expiring 0.9.3 is out tonight and includes a nag-free start up, plus some bug fixes for URL linking, dates, tabbing, and syncing. Thank you for taking the time to report these bugs in The Hub. As you can see, everyone wins with this kind of participation.

And one more thing: the new print functionality on the way for 1.0 uses user-definable XHTML/CSS for rendering. Any designers out there want to help dream up the ultimate set of print templates? I have a start (and they use hToDo just for fun), but I would love to see other angles. Starter ideas might be: actions listed by project, actions listed by context, a list of projects for review, etc.