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I find it kind of odd that Oram is talking about the use of open source since Sugar's commitement to OSS is actually pretty shaky. I've been using SugarCRM for several months now, and while it generally does a good job, I wouldn't call it true open source.
In this interview, Oram talks about how silly it is to pay outrageous license fees to software developers, yet for SugarCRM, the most advanced, and useful, features only exist in the paid version of the software. Furthermore, he touts the huge numbers of developers working on SugarCRM. While I don't dispute his numbers, my experience is that while Sugar may encourage developers, those working on the free version are actually discourage from contributing. Over the last few months, they were continually set back by a series of SugarCRM releases that broke their contributions. One of the most prolific developers seems to have given up in frustration. To add insult to injury, using some of the 3rd party upgrades to SugarCRM (which Sugar encouraged) actually prevented the SugarCRM upgrade from working.
As far as I can tell, few, if any, of the 3rd party contributions to SugarCRM actually get rolled into the free version of the product. Yes, it is perfectly legit to charge for an open source product, but Sugar seems to be actively preventing the enhancement of the free version while claiming to promote it.
And of course Sugar went after vTiger when vTiger had the temerity to actually fork the SugarCRM project.
All in all, I think they could have found a better example of OSS to highlight.
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