Talking about Open Source Vs Walking the Talk
January 19th, 2007 by Richie
There was a recent comment on my blog by Carlos (Thanks Carlos) which seems to state that vtiger is not committed to open source while the competition is.
This blog is to clear the air about it. Let me quote Carlos’s post as reference.
“One of the things that SugarCRM guys got right is their marketing - their message. I dont know if their community is responsive, or if the forum works; but I can go there and I’ll read a definitive message about the importance of open source in their strategy. The open source version is where the community contribute, it’s the one where a lot of eyeballs are fixed. And there’s no best way of catching a lot of bugs than to have a lot of people hunting them.”
Here one clearly sees the impact of marketing on facts. As Carlos himself acknowledges the Sugar boys have got their marketing right.
I would like to point out that for someone to have Open Source as an adjunct, as a marketing slogan and to proliferate the Commercial version is not exactly right but then marketing makes it seem ethical.
vtiger does not do any marketing so you can be assured that there is not going to be any news that is not coming from the horse’s mouth. I am one of the vtiger horses so you hear it live from me here and everywhere else. I cannot commit something and make life difficult trying to keep it and in the process, wean away from the actual priorities. This is so because vtiger believes in walking the talk. The competition are more into the Talk per se.
vtiger is committed to ONLY Open Source. This is not something that is easy to do as the past history of Open Source products will tell you but then, I firmly believe that it is difficult, yes but not unsurmountable.
vtiger will hopefully start making profits by March-May 2007 and this is solely because we have walked the talk. This has been solely because YOU have supported us and helped us when we were unstable. This has been solely because YOU believe - in being free and in free source.
No one can expect to have more marketing than THIS VERY FAITH that you all have in us.
I cannot commit to you that all the posts in the forums are going to be answered when vtiger has to make a livelihood too. vtiger’s livelyhood is through the support and that too the TRUE support not the ‘marketing-kind-of-support’. The product is free, the source code is free; do not expect the service to be free. Come on, draw the line somewhere. Help us in making vtiger better, self-sufficient. We are in it together.
We have come so far together, let us make life better. Life is Good actually! If all of us pool in just 10 minutes of our time in a day trying to make the wiki better, then, we can have at least 70% of the common queries answered right there in the wiki!
By buying the support contract, you are only supporting the Honest Open Source and not the ‘marketing-kind-of-open source’. Choose your pick. I am not going to feel disappointed if you choose the later as I cannot service something that I do not believe in myself.
You choose your pick
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Hi Richie,
“vtiger is committed to ONLY Open Source”
Well, I am very happy about that, but also afraid that you and your team will suffer of it if you don’t get a marketing strategy at some point.
I am not saying that vTiger software has to release a payable version but you have to think about marketing else how long is vTiger going to survive? What about the employees? Do they earn money enough compared to the quantity of work done?
I know your money is not of my concern, I just try to state the points which seems important to me.
How to have a marketing strategy with a truly open source product? I think that’s the real challenge, and I believe you need an answer to this question if you want to survive.
Of course the “support” scheme is the most effective way to make money with OSS, and that’s why I believe you must think about it harder.
In my past experience with vTiger support, i had good periods with quick feedbacks and short, straight to the point answers to my questions. But some other periods (especially since the development of 5.0.x) , I struggled to get the support my boss paid for(You can thanks him because he took the decision to keep paying even when I didn’t get support and told him to stop paying).
I need to say that now things are getting back to normal, the support is good enough for the price it costs.
I have a question, is it the same team doing the support and development?
Anyway, I believe(with my limited experience) that vTiger should use the communities from each country to create support portals in different languages (phone, VNC, skype, etc.) and so, the core vTiger support team would only have to deal with the technicians from each of those portals for specific and technical questions.
The point of a strategy like that is to divide the power, or I would say the marketing power.. Each of those portals would have to develop there market on there own, avoiding a bottle neck for vTiger core team on support queries. The big need is to have a structured support plateform for b2b. Each portal contracting vTiger have an account with several technicians, a chat(general/by account/by technician), forum, mailing list, vnc, etc.
I believe this is not the solution, but it is a part of it, and I also wish to all the employees of vTiger team that at some point they will get the fruits of there hard work.
Whatever my comments are, I believe vTiger is a great product and tend to develop even more in the future of the CRM software market.
It is because I want to help that I speak sincerely, don’t hesite to tell me if I am wrong.
Regards,
Clem
Being a pure FREE open source company is great. It is great for a team of engineers who have some spare time on their hands and want to experiment. At the same time, this means that companies that like your product are embarking upon a dangerous path. Specifically because you have no marketing plans, because you are not trying to make money and be there for a long run. Vtiger started as a fork from SugarCRM, has not become profitable since, and unlike SugarCRM has no marketing plans. Which means you have no plans to become a company. So you started with someone elses’ code, improved it (hopefully) by making changes to the GUI and some modified business rules and then what?. What happens to vtiger tomorrow? In a year from now? What if Sugar closes their code? What about the customers that start collecting vital information in their vtiger systems and then discover that vtiger engineers are nowhere to be found? Hard questions, which any open source company needs to answer, before they can gain trust from a LARGE community, let alone medium-sized companies.
Hi Krem!
Thanks for taking out the time to comment on this.
vtiger does not believe in marketing in the sense that we will not make any big noise about ourselves too much. We believe that if we do a good job and if we are able to deliver value and our users see that, then our job is done.
My team size is 12 now.
As of now, as I have said before, vtiger is set to make profits in or around March-May period. So that will answer your first 3 questions.
For a brief period, our support quality was not good as there were very few guys and too much support to handle. Hence we were not able to provide the kind of support that we wanted. I do sincerely apologize for that torrid period and yes, I do sincerely thank your boss too :-).
Yes, the same team plus the new memebers are taking on the support load.
I like your idea of language-based portals and will think about it. Yes, it will take off the load from us.
We are working on the b2b and you should see it in the near releases.
Thanks for taking out the time once again. Do feel free to post your views. If vtiger has to improve, it has to take just criticism too.
Hi Steven!
“It is great for a team of engineers who have some spare time on their hands and want to experiment.”
This was so in the past and is the orthodox definition it seems.
Please try and understand that we are in this for the long run and we DO INTEND to make money too BUT IN THE RIGHT WAY.
I would request that you go through the forums and other posts which will re-assure you of vtiger’s long term commitment towards the cause.
Regardless, good to have you here Steven. I hope that we get to talk more often. I sincerely request you to read through the forum posts, look at the dates, the releases made, the blog posts (new and old), the modifications to the product (new and old), etc? You really think we did all these just for the ‘engineering-high’?
Hi Richie! Thanks for your answer, and more - thanks for having taken it very seriously, as the amount of new posts on the blog today has shown! All that said, I think I can add a few comments. Take it all with a grain of salt though; I may be totally wrong on a number of places, but I’m well intentioned and I sincerely hope to be contributing for the growth of VTiger.
First of all, although I commented on the “marketing” side of SugarCRM’s commitment to open source, that was NOT the main point of my post. The main point is that VTiger *need to have more focus*. Going further, VTiger should focus on the things that really count: *development coordination* and *community building*. These are the two things that differentiate the open source projects that survive from the ones that do not.
On the development coordination front, the pieces seem to be there: there’s a blog, a Trac, a Wiki, and the forums. But at the same time, it seems that the coordination is weak; there’s a lot of duplication, documentation is sparse, and so on. I believe that the VTiger team should focus more on the *coordination* than on the *development* itself. This is something that the community cannot do, for the simple fact that it does not have the necessary vision. You, as the company behind VTiger, should provide this vision.
Putting it in other words: the community can contribute with a lot of things. The community can contribute with code, ideas, bug reports, and documentation. But the community is not able to tie it together in a meaningful sense. I feel that should be VTiger’s primary duty, to keep things tied together and focused. It’s your duty to make sure that everything fits together and that the final product stays consistent. And you did a fine job with Vtiger 5.0, in several counts, so I know you are able to do it!
On the community building front, I believe we need to start from the recognition that VTiger’s user base is widely diverse. Many open source projects have a strong base in the US or in Europe, and benefit from having a core user base which shares the same culture and values. VTiger is different in this sense, which can be a blessing or a problem. Sometimes I feel that the communications in the forum suffer from lack of clarity.
Another potential problem for VTiger is that it is a product for businesses, and most of its user lack the time to spare on the project. VTiger does not cater for students or casual users, as many other projects do. What does it mean? It means that things should be easy for the community. There are some ideas, which may or not be practical. For instance, I would rather have a newsgroup or mailing list than the web-based forums. I feel that forums are fine for some applications, but at least for me, having a mailing list would facilitate participation. It’s much easier for me to go through a few dozen messages per day, quickly replying to a few ones, than to click on a few dozen threads scattered all over the forum. As it is, the system is an invitation for unanswered posts. A mailing list would lower the barrier to contribution, and would improve the “community feeling”.
I could go on and list a lot of other stuff, but I feel that the main points are covered. I’m available for discussion, be it here (on the blog), on the forums, or in the mailing list.
Hi Carlos!
Let us get this straight Carlos. All posts in vtiger are well intentioned. Everyone has a say in it as everyone feels he needs to do something about vtiger. I want you all to know that that feeling is what counts more than anything else. Richie need not be right at all times, he is also a human and he can and will make mistakes. He looks upto you all to help him get back on track.
So feel free to voice your ideas.
I agree -dev co-ordination and comm-building are THE 2 priorities for longer terms.
I agree with vtiger taking the lead in the co-ordination efforts.
As you would have noticed, we have opened up international forums to ensure that we address widely different geo-political requirements.
But I do concede that this is just a small step toward making more use of the knowledge floating around.
Point taken about the mailing list for non-tech talks. We will discuss this here and get something done asap.
All said and done, I will still look upto you folks for guidance and exact pain areas. Do let me know.
I will start working on this asap.
Richie