And you choose to mess around with PHP??? Ok just kidding - php is a great language. In our business we *have* to work in .net so Sugar or vTiger were never an option. My options were Splendid or Blue Whale - having assessed both I felt Splendid was more suited to our needs.
I agree that Splendid would do well to adopt it's own identity but as with most things it's alot easier to say than to do - and just as with vTiger there is the whole license "matter". There are in fact alot of benefits to being interoperable with Sugar - such as the support for terminology imports - believe me when you are running a system in three or four languages then access to a terminology pack of 6000+ terms is a very big deal. (Unless you happen to have a bunch of spare multi-lingual monkeys to do the legwork).
I just came across this thread and wanted to add my opinion as well.
Before finding Splendid, I took a look at several CRM open source products that would work great in a hosted environment. Sugar was evaluated on two different occasions and two different versions of their product as well. I liked the functionality of Sugar (from what I read) but when it came time to actually use the product, we had one heck of a time to install it, let alone be able to get any sort of answer on configuring multiple instances. We weak in php development, but are much stronger in .net development coupled with the functionality of the 'open source' version of their product aside from virtualizing each instance, only their newest product would allow us to have multiple instances to 'host' their CRM, to my dismay, their sales would not allow our company to purchase the datacenter edition of Sugar to allow us to host the product (even though they tout the product for just that purpose).
Splendid's open source product works very good from my comparisons, and is easy to set up for multiple instances for hosting. Support on the forum is fairly good as well. Taking away several features for GPL in my mind would take away from current customer experiences of the product which could become harder to support even in forums since the new "GPL" version would be losing features, I'm sure we'll be reading "that feature is no longer supported, you should run ....". Why not have keep the features as is, or even give the source for the db that you get with the professional version, and change for "support" packages. If you don't want to rely on forum responses, you can pay for different levels of support, even extend the support for customization of the software for those users/companies who don't have the time to modify the software themselves?
