It’s a cliché to say by now, but the world has entered stormy economic waters. Spending on information technology is due to decrease for the foreseeable future. Being less expensive than traditional development and often delivering better results, the growth of Low-Code Platforms is about to accelerate even further. Planet Crust offers the premium free and open-source Low-Code Platform Corteza for building records-based management web applications.
It is a testament to SugarCRM that it spawned so many open source forks, before deciding to take itself down an exclusively closed-source, proprietary route. There seem to be dozens of them out there, each claiming to be unique while all working from the same core community edition engine, abandoned by Sugar CRM all those years ago. Read more
For many, either being part of something bigger than ourselves or standing up for closely held principles are important. In June 2019, Crust Technology contributed all of its software intellectual property to the Commons Conservancy, an independent open-source foundation. In doing so, we created Corteza, “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”.
T
he objective of Corteza is clear – to deliver a 100% free, open-source, self-hosted cloud platform for growing your organisation’s productivity. It enables relationships and protects the work and the privacy of all those concerned.
This effort began by producing a fully-featured alternative to Salesforce – the cloud leader in CRM – and an alternative to Slack Enterprise Messaging. All of this is presented via a unified interface on the frontend, joined up with automation on the backend. Very recently, we also released Service Solution, a self-hosted enterprise-grade alternative to Salesforce and Oracle Service Clouds.
Everything is delivered with modern, hyper-efficient code. Organisations can benefit from the impressive low-code development facilities to build their own custom apps, reducing costs and lowering time to delivery.
The publicly stated values of the Corteza project are as follows:
Public Good:
Corteza’s software and other offerings are designed and provided as a public good for the public benefit.
Open and Transparent:
Corteza’s governance and operations are open and transparent. It uses the best practices from across the not-for-profit, private and public sectors.
Diverse and Inclusive:
Corteza’s members, policies and programmes are designed to actively foster diverse, inclusive and non-discriminatory participation.
Built for Humanity:
Corteza’s software and other offerings have a real impact on people’s lives. As such, they are designed, built and provided with a strong emphasis on quality, privacy, security and usability.
All Crust software is built 100% on the Corteza code-base. Professional versions of Crust software are made freely available to the not-for-profit sector, including all professional software maintenance.
On top of this, Crust is beginning to push development of Corteza’s outreach Programmes, which range from Humanitarian through Ecological to Privacy Programmes.
Delivering a standards-based public good, then constantly striving to push those standards higher is a lot of work. Being part of something bigger than us is key to the Crust team’s identity and to our brand. Since the launch of Corteza, we discovered that the more we give and the better we give, the stronger our business gets.
The Not-for-Profit sector deserves an approach to building software that is inclusive of its requirements and which ensures organisations in the sector do not fall out-of-step with developments in the private and public sectors. Crust and Corteza successfully deliver this approach, feature-rich and with ever-reducing economic barriers to entry and participation. Our low-code philosophy is central to this ethos and we go out of our way to ensure that, where coding is required, it’s limited to well-supported and inexpensive JavaScript skills.
The cherry on the cake? Crust Essential Support subscriptions are completely free-of-charge for Not-for-Profit organisations and their customer bases – subject to the condition that the organisation is fulfilling its purpose by using our software. Digitally transforming and managing your relationships with your donors, advocates and volunteers have never been easier.
Are you working in a Not-for-Profit organisation? Get your free online Crust demo here.
“Because Customer and User Trust are Sacred!”
I’ve been asked a good number of times over the last few days why Crust Technology decided to donate all its software intellectual property to the Commons Conservancy Foundation and created Corteza “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”. Why give away what many tech businesses consider to be the crown jewel in their commercial portfolio?
On March 12, 2019 Crust Technology released Corteza, a 100% low code, open-source platform for Humanity. It is self-hosted and deployed via standard Docker packages.
