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SugarCRM 6 Released, But Is It Open Source?

Posted by kdawson on from the depends-what-the-meaning-of-open-is dept.

darthcamaro writes "SugarCRM markets itself as a professional open source company and this week released version 6 of its Sugar platform. But the main new feature is a new user interface that isn't available to users of the community version — it's only available to paying users. No they don't claim to be open core either, they claim it's all open source, even if you have to pay for it. '"Open source doesn't mean free and was never really meant to mean free," Martin Schneider, senior director of communications at SugarCRM, 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."'"

25 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. He's right by iplayfast · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's nothing about open source that means no cost.

    1. Re:He's right by mwvdlee · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Not directly.
      But (AFAIK) if you pay for an open source (as OSI defines it) product, you are allowed to copy and give it away at no cost.

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    2. Re:He's right by shaitand · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If there were it wouldn't be open source. Anything that would prevent this would prevent you from modifying and distributing your modified version. That is the core of open source and without that ability a license isn't open source.

    3. Re:He's right by shaitand · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When did I deny section 1? I just said it isn't the relevant section.

      Change the title and you'd fall under section 3, package it alongside the source to any of the required libraries and you'd fall under section 1.

      Any way you slice it, there is no license that could in any practical manner prevent free redistribution and still be open source let alone free software.

    4. Re:He's right by shaitand · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think Microsoft came up with one, shared source.

    5. Re:He's right by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's *an* open source definition, not *the* open source definition.

    6. Re:He's right by RoFLKOPTr · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If there were it wouldn't be open source. Anything that would prevent this would prevent you from modifying and distributing your modified version. That is the core of open source and without that ability a license isn't open source.

      The term "open" means the source is open for you to view and perhaps compile for yourself. That's it. The problem with today's open source movement is that people now automatically assume that because something is open source, it must be free. There's more benefit to being open source than just being free. You can view the source and see exactly what's powering the program, run your own audits, find your own bugs, and make sure that what's running on your machine is exactly and only what you want running on your machine. Being free happens to be an extra perk for most open source software, but it is definitely not required.

    7. Re:He's right by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Insightful

      http://opensource.org/docs/osd

      Requirement #1 is "Free Redistribution", i.e. that you have the freedom to, without limitation, redistribute the software.

      Would you like ketchup with that ?

      Only in an aggregate work. Not as an individual work... which I believe the original objection was about.

      OK so I package it with a picture of your mum sucking my dick

    8. Re:He's right by tapanitarvainen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, Snowgirl is right. [...] Open Source does not mean anything other than you have the source available. For example, so you can inspect it for security reasons, so you can make in-house only changes

      No. It used to be fairly common to sell software with source code, with explicit restriction that it may not be redistributed: source was only provided for in-house use. That is certainly not open source.

      Open Source does imply the right to redistribute, and that's explicitly allowed in every OSI license, snowgirl's legalistic quibbling notwithstanding: the definition referred is not a license or any other legally binding document, and if someone really tried to make a license that explicitly forbids redistribution of the program in unmodified and non-aggregated form, I'm sure ISO would reject it - possibly clarifying their definition, if they thought it was necessary - but the intent of the definition is clear enough, whether or not it appears legally watertight.

    9. Re:He's right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Looks like you're technically right from reading the OSI criteria (and I blew a couple of mod points to counter the 'troll' mods) but you're standing on a very small patch of ground.

      Your theoretical licence would be super-easy to work around with trivial aggregation or trivial modification, as others have pointed out. It appears to be counter to the aims of OSI, but I'd guess that since it's such a feeble loophole it's not worth plugging.

    10. Re:He's right by AlXtreme · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ie. they use the "open core" model like what the submitter hinted at: have an open source portion of your system but for any practical use you need to buy the 'professional edition'.

      El reg had a small discussion about this a while back due to in part this blog post.

      IMHO this is a business/marketing decision that will alienate open source fans. I have had to use similarly-licensed software in the past, don't think I'll actively pitch in with new features or submit bugreports for either the open or licensed version. You can make a business out of open source alone, you don't have to handicap your open source version to make your professional edition look better.

      Thankfully this tactic should quickly lead to forks. For niche markets the community will need to rally in order to support the fork, but for that to happen you need a strong community, which tends not to develop around an open core product.

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    11. Re:He's right by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Their definition is *a* valid one, regardless of the fact that they 'invented' the term (if they even did), they do not get a monopoly on it.

    12. Re:He's right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Has anyone here actually read the article (I know, stupid assumption). SugarCRM has a dual licence. There's a "Community Edition" and a "Professional Edition" (also an Enterprise Edition, but that's not different from Professional - it's just the support offers sort of thing as far as I recall).

      Now the Professional Version is obviously not "closed source" because it's a great sprawling PHP application so they have to give you the source. But that doesn't make it "Free Software". It requires a licence on a per user basis.

      It doesn't make it "open source" either. It makes it proprietary software with source code available.

      Search for "open source etymology" or similar; it's an artificial term with an artificial meaning.

    13. Re:He's right by hey! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I actually installed the community edition of SugarCRM a few years ago. My take on it is that it's got the right problem (a big, big, big part of creating a great piece of software), but that the system design and implementation is painfully amateurish. The database schema was an incoherent joke, the code meandering, verbose and inarticulate. There's no reason for code (even PHP) to be that bad.

      Obviously a huge amount of work went into the thing. The kind of work you do when you've got a poorly thought out system and real customers to satisfy. The thing about that kind of work is that if you hack away at a system long enough *in response to customer needs*, eventually it will fill those needs fairly well. Being badly engineered doesn't preclude providing value to users. We certainly found it useful, but whenever I had to fix a bug or tweak something, I was constantly amazed that the system worked at all.

      Now we all know there are two schools of thought about software development: the incrementalist (make the software work even if it is ugly) and the purist (make it elegant even if you have to rewrite it). The reason these two schools persist is that they are both right in different situations. There are times you have to live with less than elegant, and times when you have to bite the bullet and do major rewrites. I think most successful programmers balance these impulses, tidying up and refactoring as they fix bugs and meet customer's needs. The sign of a skillful programmer is that the more he works on a body of code, the simpler and more elegant it becomes. But when you have a gawdawful mess like SugarCRM, it makes no sense to invest anything more than occasional trivial effort unless you're willing to commit to a complete fork. You'd have to do major refactoring unless you were willing to spend all your time hacking your way through cruft, and the SugarCRM folks probably wouldn't because they actually understand all that unnecessary complexity.

      Overall I'd say that SugarCRM is a useful, but mediocre piece of software. If you can live with its limitations, it is an asset, particularly in a small business where you have to introduce management to the novel concept of CRM before getting them to part with money. SugarCRM is not much of an asset to F/OSS, because it's not likely to attract many talented contributors to the core system, yet discourages them from developing competing solutions because it is "good enough" for not-too-demanding users.

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  2. Well.. by ak_hepcat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure, if it's open source, then one paying customer can take the source and fork it back out to everybody else for gratis.

    That's what open source means.

    Trying to disguise commercially licensed software as open source is setting yourself up for failure.

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  3. Open source by Eric+Smith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They only give the source to paying customers. But do they prevent those paying customers from redistributing the source? If not, then it really is open source. Nothing about open source requires that owner of the code give it out to everyone, but if there are restrictions on redistribution, it's not open source.

    1. Re:Open source by jamesh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "open source" is one of those terms made up of two words who's meaning appears to be redefinable to suit the needs of any given agenda. That's why terms like 'GPL' and 'BSD' are more useful as they define what the terms of the 'openness" are. On slashdot "open source" and "GPL" are mostly synonymous but not necessarily in some industries.

      but if there are restrictions on redistribution, it's not open source.

      Well even GPL fails at that. It places the restriction that if you distribute the binary then you must make the source available too. That's kind of the opposite kind of restriction to what you were saying but it's still a restriction in that it limits your freedom to do what you want with the code, but only in as far as you can't deny others the freedom you were granted, which is widely considered to be a good restriction.

      Even Microsoft open their source to various organisations (academic mostly). I think they don't ever refer to it as "open source" though but "shared source" instead, so I guess they are off the hook.

  4. Use "gratis" not "free" by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can we please stop using "free" when we mean "gratis". You know, when something doesn't cost anything. "free" is too ambiguous.

    1. Re:Use "gratis" not "free" by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Can we please stop using "free" when we mean "gratis". You know, when something doesn't cost anything. "free" is too ambiguous.

      How about we stop using "free" to mean "restricted by a particular set of rules that I happen to agree with", since that's a vastly less honest equation ?

    2. Re:Use "gratis" not "free" by dotancohen · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Who modding this as troll? It is exactly what I intended to post. "Free" means "without cost" no matter who has hijacked the term or what contingencies they associate with it.

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    3. Re:Use "gratis" not "free" by leenks · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "You are free to go" / "You are free to duplicate this"
      "This item is free"

      All have similar meanings, ie there is not "cost" involved (of whatever kind - monetary, legal, ...), but the currency of "cost" is different in each case.

      Nobody hijacked anything. English has been this way for a long time.

  5. Re:Want open source? by bigsteve@dstc · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Here's an excerpt from the current Evaluation License, copied from the SugarCRM website.

    Licensee shall not bifurcate the source code for any SugarCRM open source licensed products into a separately maintained source code repository so that development done on the original code requires manual work to be transferred to the forked software or so that the forked software starts to have features not present in the original software.

    That smells of "not open source" to me.

  6. Re:Want open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    No- this doesn't smell fishy. It is fishy. It is not libre. They are restricting your rights to modify the code. Somebody should have a shitfit about it.

  7. Re:This has bothered me for a while... by Requiem18th · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wrong, to put it bluntly. You miss the point of software freedom/openness. Basically it's freedom from lock-in.

    Software freedom means freedom from lock-in. As long as the original vendor retains control about who runs the software, how the software is run and what the software can do then it lacks that *freedom*.

    Software openness is about distributed development/ownership of the software. Everybody is considered an author of the software even just potentially so and everyone can use it as they see fit, including sharing it with others.

    SugarCMR is neither free nor open, they are simply dishonestly representing themselves.

    Yes sure they can come up with whatever definition of open they want, for that matter I can call say I sell holy software, or rainbow software, I just have to make up whatever definition will sell.

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  8. Re:Want open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Because it's an evaluation license for the enterprise product, dumbass. The "open source" one is the community edition which is GPL3.

    They do interpret GPL3 to mean you can't remove attribution in their UI though which is questionable. There is a message which will say

    "This copy of the SugarCRM customer relationship management program appears to have legal notices or author attributions modified or removed in violation of the GNU General Public License version 3. Please contact SugarCRM Inc. to correct this problem."