SugarCRM announced that it will be offering support services for its free, open source customer relationship management (CRM) software Sugar Sales. The move is designed to take market share away from companies like Best Software and Salesforce.com, who provide – for a fee – their own CRM products.

John Roberts, SugarCRM’s CEO, called the company’s open source platform, “the Linux of CRM.” The company is charging $149 per year for the support service. Following the business model employed by Linux distributor Red Hat, SugarCRM will continue providing the software free while charging for installation, training, technical support, patches and upgrades. The company said it is planning on introducing, in October, hosting services as well.

In order for customers to make a smooth transition from pay-to-license applications, to open source SugarCRM, the company is launching a software tool designed to import data from rival programs. Since April over 20,000 copies of its management software have been downloaded. Roberts said that number far exceeded what he had planned. Indeed, SugarCRM is one of the most popular programs available from Sourceforge, a Web site that hosts many open source projects.

The company has been described as a bold trailblazer. SugarCRM’s staff consists of 10 people, which to many is remarkable in light of the competition pressure it is putting on other companies in the CRM market with resources many times greater than Sugar’s.

Last month, venture capital firm Drapel Fisher Jurvetson infused the company with $2 million in venture capital. It remains to be seen just how much the company can leverage with this sum. Regardless, the challenge it is providing the dominant companies in business applications, like Oracle and Microsoft, is one that while not necessarily an imminent threat, has caught their attention just the same.