UPERTINO, Calif. (July 25, 2007) - SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is the most widely used free and open source (FOSS) license in the market.

"For all that a great deal of attention was given to the arrival of the GPLv3 (Gnu General Public License, version 3), few software developers announced plans to move their programs to this new license. Now, open-source programmers are beginning to give the new license a try."

Tell me, is anyone of significance -- besides the Samba Group for its CIFS (Common Internet File System) Windows-compatible file and print server program, and the license's creators, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) -- going to adopt the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License Version 3)?

"The Free Software Foundation has published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). This is a new license; it is based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3), but has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to foster user and development communities around network-oriented free software..."

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA—Monday, November 19, 2007—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3).

The GPLv3 debates are drawing to a close. By the end of the year, it may have become reality. Whether or not the Linux kernel team will adopt the new license, however is still up for debate. Linus Torvalds is not as fervently anti-GPLv3 as he was in earlier renditions of the license, but he still isn't ready to support a wholesale move to it, either.

"Free Software Foundation (FSF) leader Richard Stallman said at the launch of version 3 of the General Public License (GPLv3) late last month that businesses are “foolish” not to adopt non-proprietary technologies."

The big news for today is definitely open source licensing, with SugarCRM going GPLv3, the OSI approving SocialText’s Common Public Attribution License, BMC selecting the BSD license for its open source projects, and the newly re-named xTuple introducing yet another license.

"The license changes keep coming. While work is wrapping up on the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), the Free Software Foundation has released the first discussion draft of the Affero GPLv3."