Dan Farber of ZDNet posted a good article that talks about user experiences while tryign to understand open-source product offerings.

In the article he talks about a user's experience coming to grips with SugarCRM's open-source offering not meeting the user's needs. I posted a reply that you can read here. Below I a copy of what I wrote.

-Frank

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Hi Dan and Larry: Thanks for bringing the ZD communities' attention to this issue. My company PushToTest is an open-source test automation company and we frequently need to explain our dual license model to users and prospective customers.

There are a lot of different open-source business models. I will be at the Open-Source Think Tank (http://thinktank.olliancegroup.com/) next week to meet a hundred or more fellow CEOs of open-source companies to talk about this. I want to make sure your readers know that there is no single truth when it comes to knowing exactly what you get when a company says it is "open source."

By the way, Simon Phipps, the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, led a very heated conversation about open source last year. Simon put forward that there needs to be a renewed effort at OSI (http://www.opensource.org/ ) to shame people, groups, and businesses that are pushing the open source marketplace in bad ways. SugarCRM came up in that it is a company that claims to be open source but does not allow companies to change and branch because of their attribution requirements. Simon says we need a group like OSI to shame people that aren't really playing by the open source rules.

I personally don't like the idea of shaming people, but there does need to be some easy way to identify the types of open-source licenses to make it easier for users and organizations to make informed decisions.

For PushToTest we publish our SOA, Ajax, Web application and Web Service test automation platform under a dual license. If you want to build your own test platform then download the source code – under a GPL v2 license – and build it yourself! We make a pre-compiled, tested, and ready-to-install version available that comes with a commercial license that is free for use up to 200 concurrent users in a load test, or up to 10 business service monitors. If you want PushToTest professional support – and our necks for you to strangle – or to run at more than 200 users then we sell a commercial license. There are no functional differences between the GPL source code and the commercial product.

-Frank Cohen http://www.pushtotest.com