Open Relationship Management Systems

My own development work is on the customer side of markets, with VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management. While VRM doesn't require a CRM -- Customer Relationship Management -- system on the vendor's side (see Mine! is Yours), in many cases CRM will be involved. In fact, we expect VRM tools on the customer side to carry some of the relationship weight currently carried entirely by vendor-side CRM systems.

So naturally I've taken an interest in CRM systems, especially free and open source ones. It only makes sense to leverage the growing list here, with each company or project's FOSS claims quoted from their websites:

• ADempiere -- "completely open and free"
• CentraView -- "Built on Apache Tomcat, JBoss, MySQL, Linux (Fedora, RedHat and others) & Windows"
• CiviCRM -- "The Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector"
• Compiere -- "Open Source ERP and CRM"
• Concursive -- "easy to use, easy to deploy open source solution"
• Covide - "Covide is an OpenSource project licensed under the GPL"
• Cream -- "A free, open-source CRM for media organizations"
• Hipergate -- "Open Source CRM and GroupWare"
• Openbravo -- "a fully functional, integrated, web-based, open source ERP" (includes CRM)
• opentaps -- "a complete open source platform"
• openCRX -- "published with an OSI certified BSD-style license"
• SugarCRM -- "commercial open source
• OpenERP -- "Open Source enterprise management software" (includes CRM)
• vtiger -- "honest open source"

If we've missed any, let us know.

- Doc Searls