We announced the general availability of Sugar 5.0 today. Releasing code to an open source community is a little bit like a shuttle launch. You spend 12-18 months planning, perfecting and then, finally, launch. We get immediate impact if there are blind spots. Within a few minutes, the app was downloaded close to one thousand times. So far, nothing but ‘Thank Yous’ and ‘Congrats’. Our Director of Customer Support just sent an internal email talking about how bored his team is right now.

We were confident about the release and its quality (the internal theme was ‘Red Pill’ – meaning perfection for you Matrix fans). With the help of the community, we think we came pretty damn close. The announcement speaks to many of the advantages that community-developed software has over proprietary software. During beta, Sugar 5.0 was downloaded and tested over 30,000 times by Sugar Community members.

Is there honestly a better way to build and perfect software? To put it another way, as a buyer, would you trust you dollars and business to a product vetted by tens of thousands of experts or a 7-10 person proprietary QA team that has a vested in getting the product out the door? Then answer is simple and it comes in a little Red Pill.