[Vtigercrm-developers] Happy New Year

[Preexo]

Happy new year to everyone too!
I have only joined the community of developing users one year ago. The
decision was made after looking at the big other players and we have not
fully regretted the decision yet, even though it's not been easy with
vtiger. I'm employed with a global company, which has only recently started
to adopt vtiger instead of the previously custom build CRM. The change is
being done office by office/country by country and with every migration of
another office in another country I learn more about the system, it's
advantages and also it's disadvantages, since every office will add a little
bit to the list of requirements.
Some requirements have actually been so big that we outsourced the
development and we are very happy that vtiger has such a big orbit-industry
of companies earning money with enhancing the system and writing extensions.

But vtiger as a core system is moving very very slow and not much has been
added since one year honestly. At the same time the on-demand version seems
like it's jumping ahead and becoming a completely separate product. More and
more often we are facing limitations that have been solved in the on demand
version already and they can not be solved by any extensions. 
If this development is continuing, we can soon start to talk about vtiger
like we talk about SugarCRM now: A fake open source project.
In fact I have started to look into migration paths to vtiger forks (none
that can actually compete with vtiger) and the SugarCRM fork SuiteCRM.
SuiteCRM are following the open source spirit much closer and and to me as a
user I can see a brighter and opener future than with vtiger (at the
moment).
 
On-demand is absolutely no option for us as a company and many of our
customization and extensions would not work on it in anyway!

Alan Lord (News) wrote
> Or you make the On-Demand platform code base open source too - I doubt it 
> will affect your revenue stream very much at all. In fact it would 
> almost certainly be a benefit for customers who want to move from 
> On-Demand to Open Source or vice-versa in the future.

I completely agree with Alan and I also highly doubt that having the same
code base for on-demand and open source would have any impact on your
revenue. You could for example just make all the extra modules payable
extensions and people will happily buy them but still have all the freedom.
It's the core improvements that are missing in the open source version that
have been added to the on-demand version and make it a completely different
product.
The truth is, a shared code base would make you a real open source project
again and make you the most promising of all open source CRM, a rising
instead of falling star under the open source CRM projects.
And I could stop scratching my head on how to migrate everything properly to
a different system.

Have a good year everyone, I have a feeling that 2016 is going to be a
groundbreaking year for open software, there are quite a few big projects in
beta state in the pipe which can be real game changers to the really big
ones if picked up by the masses - for me personally 2016 will be all about
decentralizing the internet again!

Best regards
Preexo



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