SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Summary: What commercial customers pay for is, in part, the community they become honored members of. When a key part of a product is no longer accessible to the community, its value is reduced to paying customers.
Long time fans (both of you) may remember our 2006 classic, Is SugarCRM open source?
Back then the issue was badges, Sugar's insistence on getting credit for every screen produced, and a non-standard license enforcing this. In time Sugar and the OSI made nice, open source legend Larry Augustin was brought in to make SugarCRM a market playa, and the bad old days were forgotten.
Well, they're back, but this time the issue isn't a license. This time it's a divergence between community and commercial distributions with the launch of Sugar 6 CRM, its latest version. (NOTE: For more on the new program's features, see Paula's excellent run-down.)
The commercial version now claims to go head-to-head against market leader Salesforce.com, but the new user interface is pay-only, leading some at Slashdot to question the company's open source bonafides (again).
The money quote is probably this one, from spokesman Martin Schneider. "Open source doesn't mean free and was never really meant to mean free." True to the letter of the open source law but, as with the badges issue, not true to the spirit.
Rather than arguing Sugar's right to do this while maintaining its open source credentials, let me ask this question. Who will enhance this new interface? Who is going to test it, and nurture it, and grow it?
Sugar's answer is Sugar and its paying customers. But if the user interface is a key element to the product, how is it going to progress the way the rest does?
What commercial customers pay for is, in part, the community they become honored members of. When a key part of a product is no longer accessible to the community, its value is reduced to paying customers.
It has always been assumed that, if a product is "open core," that is if it's open source at the center with commercial enhancements, that someone can implement the free version. It may be missing some support, some bells and whistles, but that has always been assumed to be the deal.
Now there is an important point to be made here. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is complex stuff. It's something scaled organizations do -- big charities, big businesses, big government. It's not an application for the timid. Trying to do it by yourself, trying to do it free, well if you succeed you're a better man than I am.
But that's just my point. When someone does that they gain expertise and create value the company behind the project should be able to take advantage of. If they don't you haven't lost anything from their download. So why shut yourself off from it?
With Sugar 6 CRM, Sugar is pushing the boundaries again. If you can't implement the open source version of a product, is it still open source? And if its community is locked out, does a program really have open source value?
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
SplendidCRM is listening to the Sugar customers
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Obviously you agree, but let me know how this works out in the market, too.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Yes, we do hope to spur a healthy, friendly, and competitive spirit between our two companies. Withholding the Sugar 6 UI feature seems just silly. Where as Reporting, Workflow and an Offline Client are all features that took substantial resources to implement, the UI was simply not that much work and hardly justifies the attempts to charge for the feature. By providing a similar Sugar 6 UI for free with SplendidCRM Community Edition, we hope to encourage them to do the same. From our perspective, as the popularity of SugarCRM increases, so does the popularity of SplendidCRM as there will always be those that prefer a .NET / Windows solution to a Linux solution.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Why are you adding .NET crud to the fork? Isn't the idea to make them opensource things, not make it incompatible and patent encumbered? Unless you are working with Microsoft to kill SugarCRM, then it makes sense to add .NET stuff and lock users into your version and Windows.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
We added .NET to the mix because we wanted a great CRM written using C# and .NET. We turned it into a business because we found that other companies wanted it as well. Some people or companies just don't like Linux, PHP or MySQL just as some people don't like broccoli. Your comments regarding patents are just bedtime stories told to scare the uneducated. Just because SplendidCRM is written in .NET does not mean that it will automatically have patent issues, nor does being .NET exclude SplendidCRM from being released as open-source software. Nor did we produce SplendidCRM to kill SugarCRM. It is in our best interests to ensure that SugarCRM continues to grow as our growth closely follows their growth.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
"We added .NET to the mix because we wanted a great CRM written using C# and .NET. "
Just like I thought, Microsoft devotees. If people don't want to use Linux, they can use PHP code on Windows, if they don't like MySQL they can use PHP code on Postgres and Windows. I fails to see why locking people to ASP.NET helps anyone else but Microsoft and their devotees. <br><br>You are probably the reason why SugarCRM is closing down their stuff. You steal their code and encumber it with .NET crud to lock it down to Windows. And here you play opensourceness. <br><br>I would rather pay for SugarCRM or use vTiger, anything to avoid SplendidCRAP.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
You clearly love PHP, but you have to admit that there are other languages in the world and that some people love those other languages just as passionately. My personal preference is for C#, but Java and Visual Basic also have huge followings, as do many other languages.
I also prefer SQL Server Express. It is a free database server and I have found it to be faster, more reliable and more robust than MySQL. I'm sure that you are a wiz at MySQL, and that is great, but that does not mean that there is no room for alternatives. PostgreSQL is also fine database server, but there is no question that I'm more productive when working with SQL Server.
The whole point behind SplendidCRM is to provide an alternative for those that want one. If you don't want an alternative, then that is fine, stick with SugarCRM, but to suggest that no one else is allowed to have an alternative is just wrong. To suggest that SplendidCRM should not exist is also wrong. The whole point of open-source is to provide alternatives.
Imagine if the MySQL folks took your advice in the early days and abandoned the project before releasing 1.0? PostgreSQL existed before MySQL, so by your logic, they should have not developed MySQL because it would take away from PostgreSQL. Which is more popular now? Even though I do not like MySQL, I do like that it exists because I believe that Microsoft released SQL Server Express for free specifically because of the challenge that MySQL imposed. Oracle likely did the same with their Express product, as did IBM with their DB2 Express-C product.
Add support to PostgreSQL
I love PostgreSQL as RDBMS, which is why I've been working to add support for SugarCRM Community Edition.
Bye,
Antonio.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Nice try but you fail. You try to wiggle around of issue and hide problem in plain sight.
MySQL folks didn't need to not make MySQL because both Postgres and MySQL are cross platform and I don't give two hoot which is more popular. I can use whichever I pick on any platform I pick. I only care if it do the job.
Unlike SplendidCRAP and SugarCRM, where only SugarCRM is cross platfrom and your crap is locked to Microsoft stack. If I (God forbid) chose Microsoft stack, then I am locked for life. It doesn't matter if it sucks and if it is insecure, if I chose it I can't switch without redoing _everything_.
THAT IS THE PROBLEM
What you are doing is luring people away from Free (as in Freedom) stack to Microsoft lock-in.
I didn't say you should now give up on your CRM, and let SugarCRM take the market, I said you should use standard cross-platform development language. Like PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl... you pick.
That is, if you call yourself open source company. If not, you are nothing but Microsoft proxy for fucking up open source and removing people's choice. Admit that and stop advertising yourself like you're some kind of opensourcer. You are nothing but Microsoft proxy.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
You clearly have a bias against Microsoft. That is fine, but lets just make it clear that it is this bias speaking and not a truly informed perspective.
While it is true that SplendidCRM is designed for companies that perfer the Microsoft techology stack, there is no Microsoft lock-in. C# is available in the public domain and had been so for many years. There is even a third-party C# platform from the clever folks at Novell. The product I am talking about is Mono (www.mono-project.org) and it is a cross platfrom, open-source .NET framework. Using the Mono library, we can run SplendidCRM on Linux. The best part is that all we have to do to run SplendidCRM Community Edition on Linux is to copy the files over from our Windows machine to our Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the binary file formats are identical. Miguel de Icaza deserves a lot of credit for creating Mono.
What is even more impressive is that the Mono team have created a the MonoTouch library that allows a C# developer to create an application that will run on an iPhone, iPad or iTouch. If SplendidCRM ever does release a product for an Apple device, I can assure that the product would be developed in C# and deployed using MonoTouch.
If you want to talk about lock-in, just talk to all the SugarCRM Professional or Enterprise customers that must pay SugarCRM every year, otherwise their license expires and they must stop using the CRM. Now it would be one thing if this only applied to the SugarCRM hosted customers, but this is also true of the SugarCRM on-premise products.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
You fail again.
C# is not in public domain, it is only covered by Novell-Microsoft deal, which means that only Novell customers are covered. Mono and Moonlight are only safe to use if you are Novell customer, otherwise Microsoft dogs will come to collect royalties. It is not open source, it only has open source license, Microsoft is actively claiming ownership on it. Even if Microsoft let it go, it is crap compared to .NET and it is only designed to show that Windows is somehow better that Linux because only trivial .NET programs run on Linux (mono) and even then run slower.
It is clear that you have bias against everything not-Microsoft and that you are only interested in luring people to Microsoft lock-in.
Thanks but no thanks. I heard enough. I go with vTiger.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
If you are really worried about Microsoft suing you, then I suggest you delete ALL the software you have installed, turn off your computer and never turn it on again. Microsoft owns so many patents that I'm sure that you are violating at least one of them right now. Do you think your are safe with vTiger? Microsoft is currently suing Salesforce.com over patent violations and I'm sure that they will do the same of vTiger once the hit the $1B sales mark.
The reality is that companies like SplendidCRM Software that develop using Microsoft technologies have nothing to fear from Microsoft. As a Microsoft Certified Partner, we get several calls from support personnel at Microsoft to make sure that we have everything we need to produce great applications. SugarCRM is also very cozy with Microsoft and partners with them where ever possible. The interesting thing is that SugarCRM seems to have the same UI elements that Microsoft is suing Salesforce.com over.
The bottom line is that the use of C# and the ASP.NET technologies allows us to produce a nearly identical product to SugarCRM or vTiger with one-tenth the developers that it takes to do in PHP. Not only that, we get to do it all with a single framework, where as the PHP community must patch together over 20 libraries. Have you seen the list of libraries on the SugarCRM About page? The list is huge: XTemplate, NuSOAP, JS Calendar, PHP PDB, PNG Behavior, JSON, HTTP WebDAV, O Lait, PclZip, Overlibmws, Yahoo!, PHPMailer, HTML Safe, XML Sax3, JSMin, SWFObject, TCPDF, reCAPTCHA. By contrast, SplendidCRM has just a few Microsoft provides just about everything we need in an integrated and well-tested platform.
A non-issue
As to the issue of supporting the new UI - I don't see this as an issue at all. For the most part, SugarCRM has controlled a lot of the development of its Professional and Enterprise editions: community "check-ins" or contributions to code is very minimal - instead SugarCRM has enabled people to create extensions and modules and make them available at www.sugarforge.org. Again, the benefit here is that for the Community Edition user base - they get a great application and a huge repository of tools/extensions (such as language packs, email integration tools, etc.) in addition to community-based support. For paying subscribers - they are assured of a well maintained, pristine code base and an enterprise-class software offering.
We will continue to fully support Community Edition development as we have in the past - and the UI is only one of a number of features that act as a business driver for those installing Community Edition to "Go Pro" as we call it. There will be no loss of resources aimed at Community Edition, nor any loss of momentum for the continued development for the new UI - as that is primarily done in-house. In fact, we are already nearing completion of some great new features and user experience enhancements slated for release in the fall.
Ultimately, this is a non-issue and our community is excited about the new features in 6.0 just as much as our paying customers are excited about the UI enhancements.
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
What are the new features in SugarCRM 6.0 Community Edition that were not in SugarCRM 5.5 Community Edition? Most of the new features listed on the "New in Sugar" page on the SugarCRM web site are Professional or Enterprise only. What did you do for the community in this buid?
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Paul - there are dozens of new additions - mainly around Studio and Module Builder enhancements, the new user setup wizards etc. - a lot of additions specifically meant for the dev community.
Misunderstanding my Intentions
"Open source doesn't mean free and was never really meant to mean free," Schneider said. "Open source runs through everything we do, it enables us to be transparent and gives customers more power. We are an open source company and it's why we're better than proprietary companies."
Many (like those at slashdot) took this to mean I was saying all of our products are open source and/or offered under an OS license. I never said that.
For a GREAT explanation of what open source means to our business, read Larry's comment's on my blog at:
http://www.crmoutsiders.com/2010/07/15/some-thoughts-on-open-from-sugarcrm-ceo-larry-augustin/
Thanks,
Martin Schneider
SugarCRM
RE: SugarCRM 6 community and commercial diverge
Jay