Free Software is good for business

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"Secondly we think its going to accelerate the innovation and interaction of our own community with other open source development communities around the world. The Sugar Public License (SPL) and the GPL are incompatible due to the viral nature of the GPL. There is more code out there, and there are more developers working under the GPL than under the SPL. Given that the GPL is the most widely accepted open source license around the world we wanted to remove that obstacle to integrating our product with other products running under the GPL."

During the last three years SugarCRM has been very successful in a rapidly growing market. Over 8000 developers have registered with the project, and there have been over 3 million downloads of the software. At the enterprise level SugarCRM has over 1300 customers, with up to 500 seats a time. The download version is even more successful.

Oram notes that "the market for open source business automation software, CRM and ERP, is getting bigger. 10 years ago a lot of companies still ran themselves on paper." The open source nature of SugarCRM is creating new markets for business automation. "Smaller companies that wouldn't previously have invested in CRM are running Sugar Open Source. There is a lot of green field opportunity for us. In this market [in which there is no history of business automation software] our biggest competitors are Outlook and Excel..."

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