SugarCRM, a vendor of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced the upcoming release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will be licensed under the new Version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

 

The GPL is the most widely used free and open source license in the market.

 

"We are proud to adopt the GPL V3 with our next major Sugar Community Edition release," said John Roberts, CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM Open Source Project. "We would like to thank the Free Software Foundation for leading such an important effort to deliver the most modern FOSS license."

 

Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is expected to be released around Septemberish, and introduce new platform features, CRM functionality and community development tools.

 

In early May SugarCRM announced plans to expand support for customers of the Oracle (News - Alert) Unbreakable Linux Support Program across all SugarCRM products.

 

Based on the growing demand, SugarCRM and Oracle can now provide their joint customers what SugarCRM officials call "a robust, fully supported product."

 

The support of Oracle Unbreakable Linux is "a direct result from the SugarCRM customers demanding high-quality, reliable CRM applications," said Paul Oh, director of technology alliances at SugarCRM. "SugarCRM has been a member of the Oracle open source partnership for the last two years, and this announcement expands our Oracle database integration into the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support Program."

 

Sugar's commercial open source model is built on modern open source and Web 2.0 languages and relies heavily on customer feedback, community contributions and strategic partnerships to bring CRM features to market.

 

This spring Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu (News - Alert), announced the availability of Sugar Open Source for users of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS edition (Long Term Support).

 

The "simplified deployment process" and "ease of use" of Ubuntu, combined with SugarCRM's feature-rich business processes, is designed to help companies "build better customer relationships at a lower cost," according to SugarCRM officials.

 

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is freely available, including security updates for five years on servers, with no restrictions on usage. Businesses can download and install Sugar from the Ubuntu repository using the integration that Canonical and SugarCRM have developed.