My earlier comments about SugarCRM (without the additional “Community” or “Enterprise” qualifiers) are an example of that thinking.

Like Andrew Oliver now also blogs at opensource.org, almost all software nowadays contain some open source components. This doesn’t mean that almost all software is open source.

The discussions always become a bit hairy when you add those opinions to the mix. The open core issue can be resolved on very objective grounds: It’s not open source since it’s about software under proprietary, non-OSI license.

Separately it is an interesting discussion to find “best practices” types of outcomes, and discuss what is or isn’t useful. Even without open core there certainly is a lot of open source software that is completely useless (even I’ve written some, it was superceded by browser technology). So yes, I care a little bit about usefullness too, it’s just not relevant in the open core debate. (To me, open source has such a big inherent value, than when an issue can be resolved purely on that basis, any other arguments are superfluous.)

But even if open core software might be useful, it’s still not open source.

But your other question is potent: must it be 100% of their production? 99%? 80%? One Really Good Contribution? We used to be open, but have gotten a bit lax lately?

No, I don’t believe there can be objective criteria for these things (which is also, I take it, the intent of your rhetorical question). Some rough measures, perhaps; a thumb-rule or two, no doubt; but objective, closed-form, hard-as-nails, immutable, eternal? Nah.

But then, Henrik goes on: “Therefore, this is not a useful direction to go into.” We may have an epistemological disagreement, here. I think the things we care about are “the things we actually care about”; when we can codify them into predicate calculus or law or other such blunt-edge tools, it can be handy, but this often involves an undesirable reductionism, limiting both our scope of discourse, and our conclusions within the thus-limited scope. If “usefulness” and “freedom” are what we actually care about, then we darned well better find ways to talk about them, instead of talking only about the related tangents and shards of meaning we happen to have formal specifiers for.

If you mean the software, you need to identify the particular product as they appear to have multiple products sharing the same name, one of which (the community edition) is open source.

Can you elaborate on the objective criteria how you define “crippleware”, “complete” or “useful”?

You can’t, those are purely subjective attributes. Therefore, this is not a useful direction to go into. The only objective and solid ground to stand on is the Open Source Definition and list of OSI certified licenses.

By adding personal aspirations beyond that only convolutes the discussion. So for instance, the Open Source Definition doesn’t actually require you to have a vibrant community. If you just passively publish open source software somewhere, it’s still open source. The OSD doesn’t require the software to be useful or complete, also crappy software can be open source. Etc…

You can of course separately wish or require that some software should be useful to you, complete, have a strong community, be fun to use, etc… I’m just concerned about software being open source, and this is what this discussion is about. These are 2 entirely different things.

So one would think, yet below “jrep” is entering purely subjective feelings into the discussion there too. This actually reminds me of a discussion on an internal MySQL mailing list once. Also then I was surprises to learn that many of those who opposed the closed source direction didn’t at all strive for objectivity, rather had all kinds of reasons why they held their view.

As your SugarCRM: Doesn’t look like the commerical versions are open source since it they are, regardless of the status of the code from which they are derived, not released under an OSD-compliant OSI-approved licence. The Community Edition looks like it is open source though.

So is this a yes or no? This is my point with asking the question. You cannot unequivocally answer yes, and the list of OSI certified licenses is a solid objective ground to stand on. Hence, SugarCRM software is not (fully) open source, I would extend it to saying the brand is not truly open source, and since this software in question comprises all of SugarCRM’s business, I would say it is not an open source business/vendor.