I'll admit i never had a prolem with vtiger forking sugarcrm initially, although i would have had they had done nothing with it but rebrand it. But as it turns out what they have done is secured a completely Opensource version to which they have now made massive advancements to. We like many are interested in the full workflows required by businesses, and the information stored in modern CRM applications provides the perfect foundation for developing a comlete business management application.

We've taken the approach of using sugar OS to date, but looking at vtiger now, and the extent to which it now supports order management on both the purchase and sale side of the equation is impressive and definitely heading in the right direction.

I cant imagine a business that stops its process at opportunities, we all need to go through quote, order invoice (and payments & financial settlement) or some simplified variation, so when an opensource crm application doesn't support these they are leaving a hole that we all have to fill.

And to recognise the previous efforts in this space, there are several opensource crm applications that provide almost the same functionality as sugar, in fact almost all crm apps look the same. I'm sure sugar looked at XRMS, browsercrm, centraview and the commercaial ones salesforce.com netsuite long and hard before they built their own.

While I'm just happy to get whats available anytime from OS, we certanly cant knock an OS provider whos filling those gaps for us all. Vtiger provides the Open source community the opportunity to build a the same functionality as what sugar will only provide at a price. And fair enough for sugar for charging, no probs there, but fair enough to vtiger, theres alot of additional opensource value coming our way.

I though Opensource was about collective power, about not re inventing the wheel, but speeding innovation, vtiger picked the best Opensource CRM application as their base for advancement, just isn't that the same sort of reusability you desire with dotproject?

Do you see a future market structure where people will still be buying and selling standalone applications for project management, crm, accounting, erp, ecommerce, websites... these spaces are converging around the customer.

And the customers requirement? Integrated softare for their integrated business.

How we get their? I hope its not a monolyth, but instead a smart integration of the best of breed, using apps like dotproject.

just some thoughts,

tim.