SugarCRM, one of the leading open source applications, has announced plans to switch their current Mozilla derived Sugar Public license in favor of the new GPL 3 license for their next community version in September. While SugarCRM took some heat for their attribution clause (which to me is quite reasonable), their adoption of GPL 3 is significant and does not preclude attribution through copyright notices. Ther SugarCRM, one of the leading open source applications, has announced plans to switch their current Mozilla derived Sugar Public license in favor of the new GPL 3 license for their next community version in September. While SugarCRM took some heat for their attribution clause (which to me is quite reasonable), their adoption of GPL 3 is significant and does not preclude attribution through copyright notices. There’s an FAQ on SugarCRM’s site that provides more details. While IDG reported this as “User Pressure Leads SugarCRM to Adopt GPLv3” I think that had little to do with it. There’s really nothing particularly onerous about the license Sugar had and they have always provided access to their source code even if the SPL did not have an OSI seal of approval. I think its likely just easier to have a more popular and standard license since the GPL is well known. It’s one less thing for people to think about during an evaluation cycle. MySQL went through the same issue many years back. Update: As reported by The Register, the OSI has now approved an attribution license. Ross Mayfield of SocialText proposed an attribution license known as CPAL (Community Public Attribution License) which is now fully recognized by the OSI along with the Apache License, BSD, GPL, MPL, PHP, and a couple of dozen others. After months of back and forth between open source vendors, the OSI and pundits in the blogosphere, it’s great to see that common sense prevailed. Congrats to all those who persevered to make this happen. And now we can get back to more important issues… Open Source