More Icing on the SugarCRM Cake

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source and Virtual Deals

As usual, Matt Asay is spot-on with his analysis of Fonality's acquisition of Insightful Solutions, especially here:

With this Fonality + Insightful/SugarCRM solution, customers will benefit from a unified solution that connects employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360-degree view of customers and business partners.

Given SugarCRM's technology role in this deal, I'm surprised that SugarCRM wasn't involved in the press release. However valuable Insightful's technical understanding of SugarCRM, it's still SugarCRM's code that sits at the heart of this acquisition.

Having said that, it's perhaps telling that open source enables a close relationship with SugarCRM...without a close relationship. Most of SugarCRM's code is open, thereby enabling Insightful to build expertise that would be difficult to achieve with a proprietary product.

In effect, deals can be "done" without asking permission or even telling the other partners involved. The latter nonetheless benefit from the enrichment of the ecosystem surrounding their products that new uses generate.

Another One Bites the Dust - Nicely

Here's double good news:

SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is the most widely used free and open source (FOSS) license in the market.

Double because it sees yet another major open source enterprise stack company adopt the GNU GPL, and because it's gone straight to version 3, with no ifs and buts, which will only strengthen that licence's position. Interesting, too, Eben Moglen's quoted comments:

"We believe that sharing knowledge is good. We encourage other important free and open source software projects to take this step and join us in making better software."

Plugging in to Asay Power

I met up with Matt Asay (pronounced "ay-see") recently. I learned from this that he's had what amounts to the perfect career in open source business: training as a lawyer (including some work with Larry Lessig), then stints with Lineo (a pioneering embedded Linux company) and Novell (during which time he founded the Open Source Business Conference) before joining Alfresco, an enterprise content management company that is one of a whole new generation of businesses that collectively make up the open source enterprise stack.

My meeting also confirmed something that I had suspected for a while: that he is the most astute commentator on the open source business scene, bar none.

He has a new outlet for these insights in the form of the blog "The Open Road" on C|net (which means, unfortunately, that the URLs are totally opaque), where he is churning out posts at a rate that puts mere professional writers such as myself to shame. To make matters worse, he's come up with a blindingly obvious and brilliant wheeze for both generating lots of interesting copy and also providing what amounts to a grand conspectus of the entire open source business scene: an emailed survey of top CEOs there. Now, why couldn't I have thought of that?

The results are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of free software in the world of business today - and where it's going tomorrow. Here's the list of interviews:

Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource

Javier Soltero, Hyperic

Marten Mickos, MySQL

John Powell, Alfresco

Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol

Boris Kraft, Magnolia

Kelly Herrell, Vyatta

Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra

Ranga Rangachari, Groundwork

Dries Buytaert, Drupal

John Roberts, SugarCRM

Toby Oliver, Path Intelligence

Danny Windham, Digium

Bill Karpovich, Zenoss

Mark Brewer, Covalent

Gianugo Rabellini, Sourcesense

Bob Walter, Untangle

Paul Doscher, JasperSoft

Pete Childers, Zmanda

Rod Johnson, Interface 21

Harold Goldberg, Zend Technologies

Eero Teerikorpi, Continuent

Sweet as Sugar FastStack

This kind of thing is the future of open source in business:

Sugar FastStack, a software support and delivery service that provides a fast and simple way to install a complete open source software solution, including Sugar software, the Apache Web Server, PHP and the MySQL database.

Out-of-the-box solutions, full of stack goodness. (Via TheOpenForce.com.)

Open Source Evo-Devo

In the early days of free software in business - say ten years ago - there was a natural tendency to think of it as a monolithic entity. But rather as chromatography can be used to separate out the constituent parts of an apparently uniform blob, so time gradually teases out the different elements that go to make up the rich and complex world of open source.

Thus we have projects like Apache and GNU/Linux, which are so much a part the mainstream now that it probably hard for most people to imagine that they were never part of it. Then there are the projects like MySQL and JBoss that are fast establishing themselves as second-generation leaders. Finally there is the new wave - the SugarCRMs, the JasperSofts and Alfrescos - that are coming through fast.

I found a nice representation of this evo-devo in a post on Matt Asay's blog, where it is attributed to Robin Vasan. I'm afraid I've never heard of him (I obviously lead a sheltered life), but I see from his bio that he's involved with Alfresco, as Matt is, so this is obviously the connection.

Aside from the graphic - which diverges in detail from my view of things, but is broadly the same - Matt's post contains several other interesting slides (and ideas) from his recent presentation at OSCON 2006. It's well worth taking a look at.

Microsoft and Open Source: Two Tales

One is about Microsoft joining with SugarCRM, which produces open source customer relation management software, "to enhance interoperability between their respective Windows Server and SugarCRM products." A key point of this "technical collaboration" is that SugarCRM becomes "the first commercial open source application vendor to adopt the Microsoft Community License."

The latter is an interesting beast. It forms one of several Shared Source Licenses - "Shared Source" being Microsoft's attempt to counter the good vibes and reap some of the proven benefits enjoyed by open source's development methodology. Despite its name hinting otherwise, the Microsoft Community License is not included in the official list of open source licences.

One of the most interesting documents to come out of the Shared Source initiative is called "Microsoft and Open Source". What it presents is Microsoft's public analysis of free software; particularly fascinating is the wedge that it attempts to drive between what it calls "commercial and non-commercial segments". The key paragraph is as follows:

A common misperception about software developed under the open source model is that a loosely-coupled group of distributed developers is creating the software being adopted by business. Although this is true for some smaller projects, the reality is that professional corporate teams or highly structured not-for-profit organizations are driving the production, testing, distribution, and support of the majority of the key OSS technologies.

What Microsoft's document fails to note is that those "professional corporate teams" and "highly structured not-for-profit organizations" are largely filled with hackers: the fact that they are in some cases receiving good salaries instead of the usual love and glory is neither here nor there. The hacker spirit is not tamed just because it wears a corporate hat (just ask Alan Cox).

What is interesting about this is that it shows Microsoft attempting to co-opt the bulk of open source as part of the commercial world, implicitly arguing that it is the commercialism, not the open sourceness that really counts when it comes to great coding. Microsoft, needless to say, has commercialism in abundance, and so - the fallacious syllogism implies - it must be knocking out some damn fine code.

More generally, Microsoft's continuing efforts to cozy up to open source - as with the SugarCRM announcement - are really just further attempts to blur the distinction between the two, to imply that it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, and so to diminish the attractive exoticism of what has hitherto been perceived as a radically different approach.

Which brings us to the second tale.

Daniel Robbins may not be the best-known name in the free software world, but his creation, the Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution, possesses an undeniable popularity - and a certain cachet, given its reputation as being not for the faint-hearted. So when he announced that he was joining Microsoft's new Linux and Open Source Lab in order to help the company "understand open source", there was a sharp intake of collective breath around the free software world.

The news that Robbins is now leaving Microsoft, less than a year after he joined, is therefore likely to produce some similarly audible sighs of relief from that community. Although it is not entirely clear what happened, it is not hard to guess that Microsoft's desire to understand open source was not with a view to entering upon a harmonious relationship between equals.

In other words, the two tales are but one: that Microsoft is applying its considerable corporate intelligence to the conundrum of open source - hitting it, probing it, squeezing it, stroking it, modelling it, copying it, engaging with it, even - to find out where are its edges, what it's made of, how it works; and how it might be defeated.

For all the sweet talk in Microsoft's open source document mentioned above, no one should be in any doubt about the company's real objectives in all this. Its view that open source is some crazy, anti-capitalist, crypto-communistic canker, though not expressed quite so vehemently in public, is surely just as deeply held in private by its core managers (though not necessarily but its coders) as it ever was. Everything else is just a story for the children.