After four months of beta availability and testing, SugarCRM today officially announced the general availability of its Sugar 6 CRM customer relationship management platform. Sugar 6 includes an open source community edition as well as commercially licensed professional and enterprise editions.

Following on from the success of their first book on SugarCRM, Packt is pleased to announce its follow up. Written by CRM expert Dr Mark Alexander Bain, SugarCRM Developer's Manual focuses on customizing this open source CRM.

UPERTINO, Calif. (July 25, 2007) - SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is the most widely used free and open source (FOSS) license in the market.

Think of Safari as Apple outreach. Apple is the most proprietary company in the computing universe, more proprietary even than Microsoft. It’s tossing some open source code over the side, wondering what the so-called “community” will do with it.

Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and CEO, is the genius behind some of the most innovative and influential tech products in history.

After five years, Sugar's open source CRM platform remains alive and well, this week debuting a new version that touts a sharper look and new enhancements.

Open source specialist SugarCRM has developed the Sugar Open Cloud, an on-demand open platform. "Parts of open source and parts of the cloud come together," explained Martin Schneider.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Larry Augustin had been named SugarCRM's full-time CEO. After spending much of the last decade as an investor and board member extraordinaire for many (most?) companies grouped in the commercial open source category, it is good to see Larry back in the CEO saddle. This is a vindication of sorts for Larry and his vision of an open source future.

When SugarCRM announced co-founder John Roberts’ (pictured) exit last week, some folks viewed the news in a vacuum — wondering what’s right (and wrong) with the open source CRM provider. But The VAR Guy is looking at the bigger open source picture and he sees some reasons for concern.