I am not sure what the future of this system is going to be because the development has slowed down considerably, something else may emerge but the beauty of it is that you can build and control your scenes with OSC. I have used it for some of my own projects and participated in some projects that use it.
It takes a little bit getting used to, there is no editing environment, it's all done with OSC but that shouldn't stop you from giving it a spin (pun intended).
Forget the Ubuntu packages because they have not been updated in a while, it's probably better to build it from source but unfortunately the source server seems to be down today :( http://code.sat.qc.ca/spinframework