While at the LinuxWorld show in Boston, I had the opportunity to meet with Clint Oram VP & General Manager of SugarCRM (

Clint is one of the three founders of Sugar with a strong technical and product background out of HP. He was one of the principle architects of the system and originally intented to use PHP simply as a prototyping language. I asked Clint to share with us Sugar's reasoning for choosing stay with PHP and then to elaborate a bit on their business model which with their Sugar Public License is firmly set in the OSS belief.

The code is maintained in the SugarForge where anyone can download and use the code (via CVS), those interested in support and added Enterprise features can purchase a commercial license from Sugar. SugarCRM is both an on demand application (via sugar) or a resident application. The product is written in PHP 4 and runs with mySQL, Oracle, and soon PostreSQL. The architecture supports plug-ins from third party developers - check out the forge to see what's what. Those interested in hearing my full interview with Clint can Listen Now! (pardon the show floor background noise).