Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."'"

11 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 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.

    2. 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.

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

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

    4. 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

    5. 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.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  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.

    --
    Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
  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.

  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.