You misunderstood me. I did not say you failed at making software, I said you failed at open source.
In my experience open source is about creating a community; a community that feels that they are invested in the project. This can be users, coders or even companies that pay for features to be written.
The moment you hold back software from that community, to deem that some features are just for the "enterprise", you draw a line in the sand saying "these features are not for you." You take the community out of the equation, becoming the sole arbiter of what goes into the product.
If profit is not a concern, then why do you state time and again that you couldn't make enough money with your open source business model? Profit is my number one concern as a businessman, and we've decided the best way to maximize it is to remain 100% free and open source software.
You have made a different decision, which is okay. You might even be successful at it, but as Brian Prentice at Gartner points out, you now have to be compared against all the other commercial offerings out there. Your users lose the open source value of using it.
I've been having this argument with people like yourself for years now, and I thought it had faded away, but let me stress that just releasing code under an open source license does not make you an open source company. Two of the largest contributors of open source code, Google and Microsoft, would hardly be considered open source.
My complaint is not with you, your product, or your millions of users. My complaint is that you come to this forum and try to convince us that you are open source. When you hobble your community edition so that you can make money on your commercial software, you violate the very essence of why we are here.
I'll let you have the last word, since I'm sure the two people following this thread grew bored a couple of comments ago. I do applaud any effort that results in open source code, so thank you for that. The best software is open source software, so one can only hope your users grow strong enough to fork it into the best possible collaboration platform out there.
Authored Comments
This is pretty awesome. We were a Sugar user but when we hired a new salesperson they were tied to Salesforce, so we switched.
That was a mistake. Needless to say we learned an important lesson about trusting important company data to the cloud.
So, we're back on Sugar's "community edition". We plan to switch to SuiteCRM as soon as possible, and I hope the database migration is pretty easy
You misunderstood me. I did not say you failed at making software, I said you failed at open source.
In my experience open source is about creating a community; a community that feels that they are invested in the project. This can be users, coders or even companies that pay for features to be written.
The moment you hold back software from that community, to deem that some features are just for the "enterprise", you draw a line in the sand saying "these features are not for you." You take the community out of the equation, becoming the sole arbiter of what goes into the product.
If profit is not a concern, then why do you state time and again that you couldn't make enough money with your open source business model? Profit is my number one concern as a businessman, and we've decided the best way to maximize it is to remain 100% free and open source software.
You have made a different decision, which is okay. You might even be successful at it, but as Brian Prentice at Gartner points out, you now have to be compared against all the other commercial offerings out there. Your users lose the open source value of using it.
I've been having this argument with people like yourself for years now, and I thought it had faded away, but let me stress that just releasing code under an open source license does not make you an open source company. Two of the largest contributors of open source code, Google and Microsoft, would hardly be considered open source.
My complaint is not with you, your product, or your millions of users. My complaint is that you come to this forum and try to convince us that you are open source. When you hobble your community edition so that you can make money on your commercial software, you violate the very essence of why we are here.
I'll let you have the last word, since I'm sure the two people following this thread grew bored a couple of comments ago. I do applaud any effort that results in open source code, so thank you for that. The best software is open source software, so one can only hope your users grow strong enough to fork it into the best possible collaboration platform out there.