Open Source Weblog

Let’s start with SugarCRM. The company’s CEO, John Roberts, told CBR in March that it would probably offer the GPL with the release of SugarCRM 5.0.

That is precisely what it is doing. Sugar Community Edition 5.0 (previously Sugar Open Source) is expected to be released in September and will be licensed under the new GPLv3.

SugarCRM is probably the highest profile project to move to the GPLv3 (along with Samba) and in a detailed FAQ the company outlines its reasons:

“SugarCRM believes the GPL v3 will become the standard for all open source licenses, and wanted to get a head start on adopting that standard,” it states. “This will insure greater interoperability and enhanced community collaboration as GPL v3 becomes widely adopted in the same manner as earlier versions of the GPL.”

The company’s Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions will continue to offered under commercial licenses, but the adoption of GPLv3 sees the beginning of the end for the company’s controversial Sugar Public License.

The company had previously been criticized for claiming to offer open source software while using an MPL+ Attribution license that had not been approved by the Open Source Initiative.

Coincidentally, just hours after SugarCRM announced its license change, Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, announced that the OSI has approved the company’s Common Public Attribution License, which was created in June specifically to find a license that met the needs of both the OSI and developers of software that can be deployed is SaaS environments.

The approval of CPAL is therefore a significant event.

“As an OSI Certified license, CPAL should provide a solution for commercial open source application projects and companies. I expect many of the 40+ companies using MPL+Attribution licenses not approved by OSI to apply the license to their products to meet both their commercial and community needs,” writes Mayfield.

“Keep in mind there is more to it than Attribution, but it covers network use required to close the SaaS loophole in Open Source.”

While two companies have therefore given up the MPL +Attribution approach, another has shown that the debate is not over yet. In changing its name from OpenMFG in xTuple (for an explanation on the name change see the FAQ) the company introduced the xTuple Public License, based on MPL+.

Matt Asay, for one, is not impressed. “I don't think license proliferation is as bad as has been proclaimed, but there simply was no need for xTuple's license. Period,” he writes.

“It's based on MPL 1.1, but adds an attribution clause (the very thing that companies have been moving away from) and puts would-be users in an untenable position: you "must display one of the 'Powered by xTuple' logos" but the "License does not grant any rights to use the trademarks 'xTuple,' 'PostBooks,' or 'OpenMFG,' nor the corresponding logos." Figure that one out. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.”

In a comment to that post, xTuple’s CEO, Ned Lilly defends the license, pointing out that “The passages you cited are word for word the same as the old SugarCRM variant of the MPL.”

Perhaps xTuple will be one of the “40+ companies” that will be moving to the OSI-approved CPAL. [UPDATE - that's precisely what it did do, see the comment from Ned Lilly, below - UPDATE]

One company that doesn’t need to do that is systems management heavyweight BMC, which has announced its formal entry into open source with the launch of its BMC Developer Network and four open source projects using the BSD license.

As noted in March the company hired open source systems management specialist William Hurley, as its chief architect of open source strategy, and Hurley announced the fruits of his endeavor as well as explain the license choice.

“We want our interaction with you to be as effortless and productive as possible. We’re showing you our appreciation for your efforts by granting you all the rights you can stand. To us, that means adopting a single permissive license. There are many OSI-approved licenses, but the BSD license is the most open license available in the market today, and we will employ it for all our open source projects,” he writes.

Of course whether you consider the BSD license to be the most open license available is a matter of opinion. It arguably gives more freedom to users than the GPL, but that includes the freedom to take projects proprietary.

Perhaps that’s a debate best left for another time though.