SugarCRM makes a sweet choice

Today’s announcement by SugarCRM that their next major Sugar Community Edition release will adopt GPLv3 has generated lots of ink.

John Roberts, Sugar’s CEO, said the following as part of this announcement:

We are proud to adopt the GPLv3with our next major Sugar Community Edition release. We would like to thank the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for leading such an important effort to deliver the most modern FOSS license. The FSF undertook a very difficult process and incorporated many diverse developer and user needs and combined them into a fair and just representation of what FOSS means to our communities.

In a previous blog entry, I wrote I felt that the OSI did not do enough to communicate around the OSD with respect to other companies. John did the right thing by at first asserting and holding fast to his company’s position relative to the Gartner Group, OSI, and the open source community. But after considerable community commentary, his company has adopted a very rational and effective solution.

Bravo, John.

Samba already went GPLv3 in in early July, and GPLv3 will no doubt get a further boost from today's announcement by Sugar. GPLv3 seems destined to become the eventual standard for open source licensing and takes some momentum away from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) -- a northern California favorite -- that was gaining favor after the release of GPLv3 draft 2 because of the the patent, DRM, and other conditions in that draft. Now, because GPLv3 has sweetened the deal (so to speak), SugarCRM will be able to offer customers its Professional edition with a commercial license.

Chalk up another success for dual licensing and GPLv3.