Code and communitymatter,
..not a single person (or as someone noted - a handful of people).
Once again a "tech journalist" who probably has never written a line of code in his life is weighing in on a non-event as if it mattered to anyone really involved.
The great thing about LAMP stack apps is that they are all open - and Sugar is no different. If the company SugarCRM goes away - who cares? The project still has hundreds of thousands of supporters. In fact, in the UK there isn't even a real Sugar corporate office, and it's still going strong - the corporate side of Sugar is irrelevant to the product's success, and I'd argue the CEO even less so.
And I also agree that the comparison to Salesforce.com is silly. Two very different models and two very different cultures - I'd like to think that VCs sinking millions into a company knew what they were getting into. Expecting an open source company to see 500 million pounds in turnover a year in half the time as a proprietary SaaS company spending 100 million pounds a year in marketing - yeah, that's a feasible expectation. Let's see where SugarCRM is in a full 10 year cycle and then make comparisons (remember Salesforce took eight years to see its first profit).
I like how this writer throws out like 5 names over a few years of people sacked. Please. Has anyone here ever worked in sales? In tech startups? Turnover is part of the business. How many presidents and major VPs have left oracle, Salesforce, Siebel etc. without it seeming alarming (hello, Shai Agassi left SAP and less was made of that and he was actually the only brain in that operation for the past decade.)
In short, Gavin, pull your head out of your arse.