Open Source Trials and Travails

There are MANY powerful, robust, and flexible packages out there both for the desktop and the web. Software such as Apache, sendmail, iptables, and a variety of other things serve as much of the backbone of much of the Internet, whether users realize it or not. Along the lines of web-based applications, there are my personal favorites of phpBB, dotProject, SugarCRM, webmin, and Mantis. CaseySoftware hosts these applications for a variety of clients and team members in addition to writing customizations for them.

For those of you who don't know: there is serious dissention within the Open Source ranks over some recent moves by a new company called vTiger.

It appears – I have NOT done a code audit myself to confirm this – that they have taken the entire source to SugarCRM and simply rebanded it with their own logos, stylesheet, copyright notices and call it “vtiger CRM”. The logo makes perfect sense as these are always property of the company, the stylesheet make sense as they want a different look and feel, but removing the copyright notice is a NO NO. As in any Open Source application, the copyright notice MUST stay intact.

Once again, it appears – I have NOT done a code audit myself to confirm this – that they have done the entire thing again to phpBB.

The official policy at CaseySoftware is to work to be 100% accurate with the attribution and acknowledgement of any individuals and/or organizations that develop Open Source software. We do NOT plan to offer re-branded releases of the applications which we support (phpBB, SugarCRM, dotproject, Mantis, etc), but we do plan to offer releases of modules, integrations of these systems, and customizations to our clients and the community as a whole.