SugarCon, the SugarCRM user meeting held in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, did some important things for Sugar. It was a coming out party of sorts for a company with a distinct business model and strategy, namely open source. It was also validation of that strategy and, for many, a new realization of what open source means. In my discussions with CEO Larry Augustin and CTO and cofounder Clint Oram, I got a new sense of how pervasive open source really is in the software marketplace. 
