News

The managing board of enterprise open-source software company Red Hat has elected a retired U.S. Army officer, General Henry Hugh Shelton, to serve as chairman, the company announced Monday. Shelton takes the place of Matthew Szulik, who was the former CEO of Red Hat.

"General Shelton possesses the right combination of leadership, experience and industry knowledge to help guide Red Hat toward achieving its future goals," said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, in a statement.

Oracle's suit against Google for the use of Java in its Android portable operating system continues to reverberate through the open-source movement. In the newest development, Google has declined to participate in the upcoming JavaOne conference, an event formerly hosted by Java creator Sun Microsystems and now run by Sun's new owner, Oracle.

Joshua Bloch of Google's Open Source Programs Office, in a posting Friday on the company's open-source blog, wrote that Google wished it could attend, "but Oracle's recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally." Bloch noted that the company had attended every JavaOne event since 2004.

Open source CRM has a lot going for it: it’s often less expensive, it’s easily modified if you have an open-source-savvy IT staff, and if you lack that staff you can find developers readily and often at a less expensive rate than for proprietary CRM software. It isn’t for everyone, but if your company has a pressing need to test-drive software before it buys, or to make some very particular modifications to suit unique business needs, open source should be a consideration.

 

It’s also likely that open source may be a good bet for you if you’re bent on truly harnessing social CRM, because you can add data links to social media channels as fast as they pop up – and you can mix and match them to suit your customers instead of waiting for a proprietary vendor to get around to it.

 

That said, CRM vendors come in all shapes, sizes and business models. To help you narrow the field, we took a long look at this market and selected what we believe to be today’s top 10 open-source CRM vendors. By its nature, this is a fast changing market, so what’s in the top 10 today may change. But we examined utility, business models, developer communities and history, and that’s led to this list of open source CRM vendors who’ve earned their stripes.