Sugar is writing the book on successful commercial open source apps
My fellow Open Source Subnet blogger Stephen Spector wrote a piece last week responding to another post by Derek Singleton on whether open source enterprise apps can ever really be successful. In Singleton’s original post and Stephen’s post they both seem to find common ground that while open source has been a rousing success in the infrastructure space (Linux, Apache, even Mozilla according to Spector), it has not been success in the application space. Singleton went one step further and said the only example of a successful app in the open source enterprise space was SugarCRM, but that Sugar was “fake open”.
Stephen had the sense to not touch that one. I will. Sugar is no more fake open source than any other commercial open source company. In fact they are leading the way in innovative ways to monetize open source software. But Sugar is not alone. There are many open source enterprise apps that are succeeding. I guess though that depends on your definition of succeeding. To me if you are a profitable or near achieving profitability, continually growing and your investors are happy, you are successful. There are only so many Apache and Linux in the world, whether they be open or not.
Any VC will tell you that not every investment is a home run. But solid doubles and triples are where the VC’s bread and butter are earned. Companies like MuleSoft, Alfresco and yes Sugar are doing well enough to make their investors want to invest more. What bigger vote of confidence do you need?
My take is that Derek views open core business models as “fake open”, he also obviously thinks that SaaS can’t be open. Needless to say I strongly disagree. Open source is in the eye of the beholder. Sugar community open source product is not flimsy. In fact I know people who have built robust CRM programs around it. What Sugar has done is take open source to the SaaS model. Just because it is offered as a SaaS play though does not diminish its open source status.
In fact the cloud is being built on the back of open source, both infrastructure and apps. Go ask Dave Jilk of Standing Cloud if he thinks open source apps have not succeeded. Ultimately I think the cloud will be catalyst for open source apps really exploding. The problem is that people with views on this like Derek Singleton will say that they have sold their open source souls to achieve it. I say open your horizons, there is more than one way to skin the open source app!
