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back to article SugarCRM goes folksy with Mickos philosophy

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement. Not only did his company pick wisely when it came to endorsing an open source technology, it also convinced a major, publicly traded entity to part with $1bn for no discernable return - despite its …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Shame about the quality

    SugarCRM is a great piece of work, with a fantastic and wide-ranging feature set. Unfortunately its code quality is utterly dire. A clean, empty install results in over 1,500 HTML validation errors on the home page alone (you've got to try quite hard to get that many). There's no surprise that the code behind it shares the same style (with similar quantities of PHP errors being logged). The whole thing is held together with string and glue, and it is riddled with x-browser problems (now there's a surprise - these are people that think an HTML page should start with JavaScript instead of a DocType!). Last time I tried, an unprivileged user could completely wreck the installation within about 10 minutes without actually trying.

    Their different versions (GPL, Enterprise) are differentiated by a script that chops chunks out of the source files, leaving bits of empty space. That's hilarious, but scary - someone actually thinks that's a good idea.

    Given that it's an open source project, I was somewhat bemused when a raft of patches I submitted for review were greeted with the response - "We're not interested in fixing errors, please stop sending them".

    If it was all much cleaner I'd have hope for them as a SalesForce competitor, because it's a great package otherwise.

    Paris, because she probably wrote it.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @anonymous

    So fix it, sell it yourself and make millions from their work, it's what open source is all about. (course they can take your fixes but chances are they'll have developed something incompatible by then and would have to re-write code).

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  4. David Kelly

    dire code

    I have to agree with anonymous on this one. I've been writing modules for Sugar on a contract basis and am constantly amazed at just how bad the code is. I've attempted to contribute a number of patches to the code. Usually I'm either ignored or told that my patches have been included which, after looking at the code in a subsequent release, turns out to be a lie.

    This means that every time a copy of Sugar is upgraded I have to manually patch the code again. I can't even begin to imagine what a headache this would be for a company maintaining a fork, like vTiger. IMO they would be better off doing their own thing.

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