Free Software is good for business

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The fact that JBoss can be downloaded for free has been a marketable feature, and not an impediment to the rapid growth of JBoss. Open source has given JBoss a host of advantages that have depended on the readiness of JBoss and its founders, exemplified by the forceful personality of Marc Fleury (who is now languishing between projects), to follow them through to their logical conclusions. JBoss has fostered its user and developer communities, and there is close interaction between them. A user with a particular concern or requirement can gain access to the individual developer, resulting in more rapid and responsive development. Many of the advantages of free and open source software accrue from its dependence on a distributed development environment which is stripped of the traditional heirarchies, but demands greater debate and feedback from users and developers.

A logical corollary of this effect is that commercial "open source" software projects are more responsive to the demands of users and developers, because they have to be.

An ah-ha moment

SugarCRM is one of a relatively new kind of company, an applications software company that has followed the example of JBoss and the Linux distributors, but is tackling problems further up the software stack, reaching into vertical markets. In its early days SugarCRM was subject to some scepticism, according to Clint Oram, the general manager of Sugar Europe.

"When we got started (only three years ago) there weren't any other commercial open source companies, so we were blazing a trail, especially at the applications level. We were the very first venture funded commercial open source company, and the wisdom among people who didn't really know much about application software was that open source was only good for infrastructure software," he says, "but having spent our entire careers in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) we knew that there was a huge community of developers out there who had spent their lives tailoring and customising, integrating and modifying proprietary CRM packages. No two CRM implementations are exactly the same, and no two businesses are exactly alike, so there were system integration shops modifying proprietary CRM packages all over the world. We knew absolutely that there was a community out there that hadn't yet been introduced to open source, and personally, I am proud that SugarCRM has helped this community to move out of the world of proprietary CRM development into open source."

"That was one of the ah-ha moments we had," says Oram, "knowing how large the CRM community was."

From the beginning SugarCRM was licensed under an attribution license (the Sugar Public License) which was a variation of the Mozilla Public License but met with criticism from its own developers and the wider open source community because of license compatibility issues and the attribution clause of the license which required any derivatives to display the SugarCRM logo. Subsequently SugarCRM has announced its intention to switch to version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and can legitimately claim to be the first commercial open source company to do so.

Historically, it was claimed that the viral nature of the GPL was an impediment to business adoption of free software, but the opposite has proved to be true. "The GPL creates a very level playing field for everybody involved," says Oram, "for those people who take the time and effort to build the core software initially, as well as the people who leverage that to build new and exciting ideas into the software. The GPL will enable our community to interact within the larger software community. We've been following the development of the license for about a year now, and all the thought and consideration being put into it. It is the most modern open source public license available today. It is targeted towards today's computing environment and today's software, and we really like the patent protection aspects of the license."

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