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While their marketing guy may claim “that overall, Sugar 6 is an open source product from an open source company”, it’s hard to see how they are anything other than a proprietary software company who share some code with a related open source project. Claiming to be “an open source company” seems an unacceptable use of the open source brand to me. Open Core is bad for you.
☞ Open Core Case Study
Posted on July 14, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Wild Webmink 
I’ve followed SugarCRM for years. Things had become so bad and behind closed doors fake bake ‘open source’ that they only gp’d out of necessity stemming from vTiger fork. And for a while it looked like Sugar may have actually gone legit. But only so long as to take the wind out of vTigre’s sails. Then a curious thing happened, I noted slowly, but surely, more and more features became ‘reserved’ for enterprise edition. Or perhaps I would be more accurate to state that fewer and fewer features were being contributed back to the community edition.
We can play semantics all day but end result was the same – with SugarCRM’s community edition becoming increasingly crippled itś not too difficult for the astute observer to figure out that the old Sugar fake bake had simple been rebadged. So we no longer use it.
[…] an open source core, as well as a closed version with additional extensions, and opponents are concerned that the “open source brand” is tarnished by companies like SugarCRM claiming to be […]
When you go to this page
http://www.sugarforge.org/content/open-source/
It says that SugarCRM is licensed under the GPL3 when in fact it uses the AGPL3.
More worrisome is that it uses the attribution clause making it badgeware. (A)GPL3 + attribution clause = badgeware!
How did the authors of the GPL3 allowed this to happen?
How can the GPL3 + attribution be compatible with the normal GPL3 when the BSD + attribution isn’t?
[…] ☞ Open Core Case Study While their marketing guy may claim “that overall, Sugar 6 is an open source product from an open source company”, it’s hard to see how they are anything other than a proprietary software company who share some code with a related open source project. Claiming to be “an open source company” seems an unacceptable use of the open source brand to me. […]