Unified Communications

MPower, which sells nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) and fundraising products, announced that its product has been accepted by SourceForge.net, an online repository of open source code and applications.

 

"This is a milestone not just for MPower but also in the continuing evolution of CRM and fundraising software for nonprofits," said Randy McCabe, Founder and CEO, MPower.

 

With MPower now fully available on SourceForge, nonprofits and their partners have "access to the software's source code so they can develop additional features and functionality," MPower officials say.

 

MPower plans to create forums, monitored and moderated by the company's product development and management teams, covering such topics as adding new feature functionality and sharing innovations.

 

Nonprofits may innovate with the software under the latest version of the GNU General Public License, or GPLv3, all without fees.

 

Commercial users — such as other software vendors serving the nonprofit community  —  can use and develop MPower under another licensing agreement that does not require release of their modifications under an open source model.

 

In March MPower Systems announced that the company was moving to an open source software model, making its product available to all nonprofits without license fees.

 

Additionally, users will have access to MPower's source code so they can develop features and functionality to meet their organizations' individual requirements. It's available at www.mpoweropen.com.

In conjunction with the MPower Open announcement, the firm also is changing its name to MPower (dropping "Systems") and introducing a new graphic identity.

Karen Jacobs, Vice President of Finance at Precept International, an MPower client, called the move "as important a development for nonprofits as the Internet, which has become a critical tool for cultivating constituent relationships and driving fundraising."

Hundreds of nonprofits already use MPower's fully-developed, full-feature software to manage such tasks as donation processing, fulfillment, event and volunteer management, call center and mail processing activity tracking, and major donor relations.

 

Although based on a relatively young model of about ten years, open source products and companies are "clearly emerging as leaders in all areas of technology," MPower officials say, from operating systems (Red Hat Linux) to databases (MySQL) to Web servers (Apache) to business CRM (SugarCRM (News - Alert)).

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.