Alan,

I know that our Marketing Team will expound on this some and it will be a question featured in our FAQ but I will provide an explanation on this as best as possible.

Concourse Suite comes in three editions: Community Edition, Group Edition, and Enterprise Edition.

As mentioned in another post of yours certain functions such as the Website module and dashboard portlets are missing and/or not fully functional in the Community Edition of 5.0 compared with the Enterprise edition. This gap is determined by our development team and product management team.

The Group Edition is a free 5-user version of the Enterprise Edition. The Group Edition download contains a .war file which provides 5 free users. When additional seats are purchased, users are also given the source code of the product.

The Community Version includes source code *only* free of charge to use in any quantity but is unsupported, does not have an installer, and has no automated upgrade features. It is licensed under the Centric Public License (CPL). With the 5.0 release, we have for the first time created some functional differentiation between the Community and Enterprise editions, primarily around the JSR-168 portal/portlet capability that is included only in the Enterprise edition.

I would compare this with many Open Source companies that provide dual licensing of their products, many of which do have functional differences between the community and enterprise editions.

When our product presence grows you will see more activity in the community and I hope to see much of that in the near future but I think that organizations who pay for our product are not as interested to get in the nuts and bolts of the product and modify the code compared with Open Source Enthusiasts. I hope that my explanation answered your questions but if you have more feel free to ask.

Brandon Antone
Sales Engineer
Concursive Corporation

Brandon Antone wrote:
<snip />

The Community Version is the entire source code (the branch-50-community you downloaded) free of charge to use in any quantity but is unsupported, does not have an installer, and has no automated upgrade features...

Yes - I realise that and thanks for the explanation. I guess my concern was the complete absence of the phrase "Open Source" from your web site and the near silence of the community on these forums.

If your product and company is to continue with an Open Source offering, I will continue to evaluate it and make appropriate recommendations to our customers.

Many of the other "commercial" Open Source vendors are now moving to an even more open strategy (such as going GPL) in a effort to attract customers and grow their business. I'm thinking of several companies here such as Alfresco, SugarCRM, OpenBravo, Zimbra, Sun... I would be very concerned if Concursive's strategy is to go in the opposite direction.

Thanks again,

Alan

Can someone at Concursive define the differences between the community edition and the Enterprise edition?

Our company has been working with the Centric 4.1 community edition for about 10 months now to determine if it can provide us with what we need for CRM and project communication.

One of the features that brought us to Centric/Concursive over products like SugarCRM was the fact that the community edition was the same as the enterprise edition. It appears that Concursive is abandoning this strategy (much to our disappointment and concern) and moving to a model that is similar to what SugarCRM has offered in the past.

We were shocked to discover that Portal Users (which we have used extensively) appear to have been removed from the Community version. While we understand that Concursive is choosing to change its business model, it seems quite rude to remove features from the community version that were previously available.

That being said, we would really like to understand what the differences between Enterprise and Community are, and how Concursive plans on determining the elements that are not to be included in the community version. This is very important for us to determine if Concursive is the right approach for our company to follow moving forward.

Thank you in advance for your response to this.

Peter Dean

Also looking forward to a description that outlines the differences between the open source and enterprise versions.

One thing that attracted us was that in the past it was stated that one thing that would differentiate the centric system from other open source projects was that the open source/community edition would have the same functionality as the enterprise version.

Many thanks,

It does strike me as somewhat odd that an organisation like this should, apparently, choose to distance itself from the Open Source ecosystem at a time when the rest of the industry is trying hard to move further toward it.

Even the "evil empire" (Microsoft) is making tentative steps toward OSS with the setting up of open forges and the "opening up" of some of it's code... They have even employed people who understand OSS and put them into senior positions (Bill Hilf).

So why the silence from Concursive? Is ConcourseSuite going to continue as an Open Source project and where are the distinctions being drawn between the community and enterprise versions?

The general lack of activity on these forums says to me that they don't really have much of a community behind the product so maybe it won't really matter in the long run anyway. It would be a shame in my opinion though. They have a great product, and one of the few decent CRM apps not written in PHP...

Alan

Essentially, from a technical perspective, the Enterprise Edition allows us (and customers) to tightly integrate services while the Community Edition doesn't have that but still provides a CRM framework that end-users can extend.

As has always been, the Community Edition is unsupported. The source is available either way.

When moving up from 4.1, you could opt to go with the Enterprise Edition and get the code and additional framework through Concursive, or you can go with the Community Edition and manage it through Subversion.

The website got updated without the community pages getting updated -- that's coming soon as well as the marketing details for the different editions.

Alan Lord wrote:

Many of the other "commercial" Open Source vendors are now moving to an even more open strategy (such as going GPL) in a effort to attract customers and grow their business. I'm thinking of several companies here such as Alfresco, SugarCRM, OpenBravo, Zimbra, Sun... I would be very concerned if Concursive's strategy is to go in the opposite direction.

Hi, Alan, we will be posting some more polished explanations of our various editions shortly. In the meantime, I want to make a brief observation about some of the other open source vendors you mention. Each of the companies above takes a different approach to licensing. SugarCRM, for example, has a community edition newly re-licensed under the GPL. However, their Professional and Enterprise editions are licensed purely under a proprietary license. OpenBravo uses a "badgeware" style license based on the MPL that requires a "powered by OpenBravo" logo and is thus not OSI-certified. Zimbra, recently purchased by Yahoo, now licenses its open source edition under the Yahoo Public License which is also not OSI-certified. And Zimbra also maintains functional differences between its open source edition and its commercial editions. (More information here: http://www.zimbra.com/products/product_editions.html). MySQL's enterprise edition includes administration and installation tools not provided to open source users. Even Alfresco--which might be the purest open source play amongst the companies you mention--reserves, as I understand it, some "secret sauce" that they only provide to commercial customers.

My point is that all of the commercial open source vendors--including us--continue experimenting with various business models, including licensing schemes to strike the correct balance of, openness, community support and participation, and a viable economic engine.

Thanks,
Michael Harvey
EVP, Concursive

Hi Michael. Thanks for your clarifications. I look forward to seeing your update on what components will fall into the community version and what components will fall into the enterprise version.

I would like to express some concerns on your current direction, however.

1. In the 4.1 release of Centric, there was support for Portal Users. This is one of the things that attracted our company to your product (along with the fact that your community and enterprise versions offered the same features). We have made use of this feature, which now appears to have been removed from the Community version of product. I can understand that you want to move new feature sets to a new licensing model, but I don't think it is right that you remove existing features. Will you be re-releasing the Portal User feature in the community version (I think this is only fair) or will it only be available in the Enterprise version?

2. The topic of email to tickets has been brewing for a long time and one that your company indicated was coming in the 5.0. Our company has been waiting on this for some time and holding back on some of the developments we were planning on to see how this was rolled out. Unfortunately, there was never any mention that you were planning on releasing this as an Enterprise only feature. You certainly have the right to do this, but it would have been nice if you had given the community some prior notice.

3. Will you be providing some guidelines on what sorts of changes will be going into the community version? Since it appears that Community and Enterprise will be diverging, this will be important for companies like ours to know. For example, I would assume if we want to incorporate email to ticket functionality we would not be able to provide this back to the community.

Thanks for your time Michael. I look forward to your response.

Peter Dean
VP Operations
Wmode Inc.

Hi Michael,

thanks for the reply.

I do not have a problem with Commercial Open Source (We've all got to eat!) so my point wasn't really about having two versions and/or licences. My major concern boils down to this:

Since the update to your company and web site, the mere mention of Open Source has pretty much vanished. It used to be quite prominent. So I am - understandably I think - concerned about Concursive's general approach to OSS with their products, rather than the intricacies of which feature is available with what version/license.

As to your dissection of the other OSS vendors I mentioned, I just wanted to clarify the point that the concept of a badgeware license is now actually O.K. by the OSI. http://opensource.org/licenses/cpal_1.0 and has been since the end of July - funnily enough just after Michael Tiemann had a public dig at Centric, Sugar and SplendidCRM for the very same thing.

But as I said - I am really trying to understand what Concursive's strategy is with regards their Open Source products. There is no mention of Open Source on your home page and little or none elsewhere that I can find.

Many thanks

Alan

Hi, Alan, we will be posting some more polished explanations of our various editions shortly. In the meantime, I want to make a brief observation about some of the other open source vendors you mention. Each of the companies above takes a different approach to licensing. SugarCRM, for example, has a community edition newly re-licensed under the GPL. However, their Professional and Enterprise editions are licensed purely under a proprietary license. OpenBravo uses a "badgeware" style license based on the MPL that requires a "powered by OpenBravo" logo and is thus not OSI-certified. Zimbra, recently purchased by Yahoo, now licenses its open source edition under the Yahoo Public License which is also not OSI-certified. And Zimbra also maintains functional differences between its open source edition and its commercial editions. (More information here: http://www.zimbra.com/products/product_editions.html). MySQL's enterprise edition includes administration and installation tools not provided to open source users. Even Alfresco--which might be the purest open source play amongst the companies you mention--reserves, as I understand it, some "secret sauce" that they only provide to commercial customers.

My point is that all of the commercial open source vendors--including us--continue experimenting with various business models, including licensing schemes to strike the correct balance of, openness, community support and participation, and a viable economic engine.

Thanks,
Michael Harvey
EVP, Concursive

Hi Michael.

CentricCRM/Concursive has not been very forthcoming, i would actually say bordering on deceitful, with the separation between community and enterprise version features. The entire community was led into believing the features listed in the roadmap were going to be available in the community 5.0 version.

I thought the strategy was similar to Redhat where they release the source code and the business would rely on support revenue ,which was truly different than SugarCRMs offering and much more attractive. It would allow a small company to figure out how to use the system, and when it became valuable enough it could look for more of a "supported" system.

If this is an "open source" company, i suggest you work harder on your "openness" and clearly define the product editions. I would also suggest looking to SugarCRM for guidance on this. (http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html).

Geoff