Will SugarCRM ever be full open source

[jbdev]

Will SugarCRM ever be full open source? Will you ever see the same functionality in both PRO and Community release ?

I love sugarCRM but wouldn't it be nice to develop modules / enhancements for both versions without having to have both versions and having to develop your module to work 2 different ways depending on the version.

Why are things like "teams" and the new "enhanced project management" thought of as PRO only? why does SugarCRM think that will bring more "paid licenses". I would think you would have just as many "paid licenses" for the system by providing support, training, customization, and up to date bug fixes in the PRO version. The community version will have all the same functionality but lack the fast bug fixes and newest features. Community will always be sort of a version behind.

What happens when someone develops their own "enhanced project management" and that version ends up the more adopted and viewed as more feature rich ? You now have 2 modules, Someone else develops a module to work with the community version of " enhanced project manager" and so on .. you see my point. Now the SugarCRM developed one has to be enhanced to cover the ability of the community one, but you still have 2 modules to develop for now as a community developer.

very frustrating

Look to Alfresco ECM for the model I am thinking of, same thing, and they went total GPL. now you can just develop for 1 system.


Just my 2 cents

[longreach]

I believe that Sugar initially expected to pursue a conventional open source approach, deriving income only from support activities - but quickly moved to their current commercial open source model when it became apparent that the conventional model was not going to generate the returns that the investors in SugarCRM had a right to expect. I would not expect them ever to move back to the conventional model, as I think the model with commercial superset versions such as Pro and Enterprise is working pretty well for them.

You talk about an OS version, for example, of the Advanced Project Management (APM) module - and it potentially exceeding the current Pro/Ent feature. It has not been my experience that many of the 3rd party free OS modules are written to the level of the new APM module - it is really well done. I would perhaps point to Teams OS, and the advanced Print feature from kbrill, as highlights of the 3rd party OS work - but none of them have much user interface work - and the UI in APM is pretty high level.

Sugar has over 100 employees now - enough to produce a lot of high quality code - and I do not believe we could expect the speed of development, or the quality, if a conventional OS model were applied to the SugarCRM project.

[dtokeefe]

Hi jbdev,

Many of us have struggled with the same problem only to finally accept that SugarCRM is a business that needs to generate a return for the US $26 million of venture capital invested in it. The business model of commercial open source is to freely distribute a (very nice but not complete) version to evaluate, then sell you a complete version.

One alternative is to pay in the form of work, personally creating the system you need from Sugar OS plus free community-created modules and modifications. We've found that open source software is never really free, except on the rare occasions when someone else has already created exactly what we need, and releases it for free.

There is a Teams OS module in SugarForge. We released it and Ken Brill updated it to Sugar 4.5. It works well. There are also various free reports modules, notably Zucker Reports. You will also find enhancements to the Projects module, although it is still pretty basic compared to good open source projects specific to project management. There are people working on DotProject integration with SugarCRM and you might be able to roll your own integration with whatever PM software you use. Sometimes, you just need to add a single field to, say, the Users, Projects and Accounts table to maintain a reference to the PM software. You can then run a CRON job to maintain these references.

Another alternative is to pay a company like mine to do that work for you. We've done more than 50 SugarCRM projects over the last 2 years, for clients around the world, and would be happy to send you a quote. Contact:

info@lampadacrm.com.br
+55 11 3668-6776

We speak English and Portuguese.

Best regards,

David

[jbdev]

Thank you both for your post.

I understand why sugarCRM has gone to the model they are on but I have fallen victim to the frustration of the split versions. I constantly run across blank section of code removed from the community version of SugarCRM that was for the PRO version or commented out code for the PRO version. I feel the Team module should just be part of SugarCRM and is more of a standard feature of any CRM.

just a little discouraging.