Back at the 2003 OSCON, r0ml Lefkowitz gave a talk called "Six Missing Open Source Projects".The next year he gave a talk titled "More Missing Open Source Projects". At the top of his first list was CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, systems. Here's what I wrote about it in an August 2004 piece:

“Relationships are more important to most companies than code”, he said, which is why they spend more money on marketing than on programming. He said there is plenty of CRM — customer resource management — software out there for big companies, but none yet from the open-source world.

Well, that was then. I just revisited the subject, and here's what I find now:

• 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"

Am I missing any? I did leave out a couple that either run only on Microsoft systems, or address Microsoft corporate environments.

And what is your experience with any of these? I'm kind of amazed to find so many, but then all I have to do is look at the number and variety of Linux distros to get some perspective.