Implications of change management in public administration

Business Statistics – Economic Informatics
Windows. Open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have also
come up, providing competition to commercial and proprietary CRM systems such as
SAP and Microsoft Dynamics.
Difference between Open Source and Proprietary CRM Systems
Software development is the foundation on the basis of which the Information
Technology (IT) industry functions. Developers skilled in a particular computer
language such as C, C++ or Java, build software or as is commonly described, write
code to build various software applications that are then marketed to businesses and
individual users. IT companies, such as Microsoft or Oracle, employ thousands of
software developers to write code and build cutting-edge proprietary products such as
the Windows applications, Internet browsers, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
applications and CRM software. These software products are sold to businesses, who
pay for the product, implementation and support services. The source code, which is
used to build commercial proprietary software such as CRM systems, is copyrighted,
and is not accessible to others apart from select company developers.
An open source CRM software is just the opposite. A community of developers
usually does the development of open source software. The ideas and skills of hundreds
of developers come together in the creation of a single application. The developers
usually contribute their expertise for free. An open source CRM system such as
SugarCRM also followed the development model.
Open source CRM systems software is typically built using collaborative
platforms over the Internet such as Sourceforge.net In the development of the open
source CRM, SugarCRM, developers from all over the world came together and wrote
the code using their project page on Sourceforge. The programming language used is
PHP. The source code and the latest edition of SugarCRM is available for download
from their project site.
As open source CRM software is based on freely accessible and modifiable
source code, it is a straightforward process to customize it to suit your requirements.
Most open source CRM systems are based on the Linux operating system,
which itself is an open source, developed using the collaborative development model.
Languages such as PHP and Python can be used for development as well as open
database systems such as MySQL, with the use of an Apache HTTP server.
Open Source Licensing for CRM Software System - Free to Use and
Modify
While commercial proprietary CRM systems are copyrighted and access to
source code is denied, the source code for an open source CRM software system are
accessible to all. Open source CRM systems can be offered under the GNU General
Public License (GPL). As opposed to copyrighted software, a GNU GPL is a copyleft
license, which means the software as a whole is free, and users are well within their
rights in using, distributing and making changes to the source code and applications.
The GPL license also gives users the right to benefit commercially from the
open source CRM software system. However, the GPL insists that the all users must be
able to access the source code and have rights to modify it, even if a commercial
product has been built out of the open source software.
Commercial Open Source CRM System
SugarCRM, a pioneer in development of open source CRM system, has
released commercial versions of the CRM software. Calling it a "commercial open
source" CRM application, the company offers the Community Edition of the CRM
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