[Foundation-l] Open source CRM needed for Wikimedia

[Brad Patrick]

To follow up on the discussion about the SugarCRM Open vs. Professional:

[snip]


One of the key differentiators between Sugar Open Source and Sugar
Professional is the team security functionality.  With Sugar Open Source,
all users within your Sugar instance can view all records, without any
restrictions.  With Sugar Professional, all records have a field for "Team"
which gives permission for visibility.  You still have the flexibility of
giving full visibility by selecting the Global team, however you can be more
restrictive on sensitive data, such as donor information.

Another key differentiation is that Sugar Professional has reporting
functionalities.  This allows all users to generate reports on any module
they wish.  The data from reports is exportable, and you can also generate
graphical representations of the reports that can be displayed on your
individual "Dashboard".  Sugar Professional reports honor the security set
by teams so each user can only run reports on data they have visibility to.

As for customizations you make that you wish to push back to Sugar Open
Source, the first thing to be aware of is that Sugar Open Source is licensed
under the Sugar Public License which you can view at:
http://www.sugarforge.org/content/open-source/public-license.php.  Any new
modules you create can be licensed under either the SPL or the commercial
license, as long as you are not modifying existing files.  If you make
modifications to existing files within Sugar Professional (such as layout
changes) and wish to push those to the Sugar Open Source community then you
would need our permission to have those fall under the SPL instead of the
commercial license.  This is something that we would consider; it would just
depend on the type of work was done, and which files were modified.

[/snip]
So, the takeaway from this is that (a) Sugar Open doesn't have any reporting
module at all; (b) the plug in modules for email and document management
only work (presently) under the commercial license (though that may change
in the future); (c) Sugar Open is limited in the zones of security it can
offer based on "role" (y/n access to a particular module) vs. "team" (y/n
data elements within module) level of security present in Pro.  The
hierarchical group security model would work well differentiating volunteers
from staff, access to data for reporting, and so forth.  That seems to make
a lot of sense to us as an organization for our particular needs.

The Sugar Open Source license is the Mozilla Open Source license modified to
cover SugarCRM.  See
http://www.sugarforge.org/content/open-source/public-license-faq.php
.   I like the idea of us developing tools we need and putting it back into
the source tree generally.  We still need to be clear on the requirements.
If it means deploying intially under the Pro license and pushing on the
sugarforge community to free up modules etc. and making the open product
better, I think we satisfy Eloquence's cautionary notes, which apply to any
commercial-where-free-isn't-quite-yet-there software.

The proprietary license is at
https://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/on-premise-eula.html.  (SJ, you ain't
gonna like it.)

Talk amongst yourselves. ;-)

-Brad