SugarCRM Wednesday became the first prominent commercial open source operation to adopt the Free Software Foundation's controversial v3 update of the General Public License.

The CRM house said the September release of its Sugar Community Edition 5.0 (the old Sugar Open Source rechristened) would be licensed under the new month-old license. And that includes the beta that's due in a fortnight.

See, the company's own Mozilla-derived license wasn't a recognized OSI-approved open source license and required SugarCRM attribution, leaving it open to criticism, which may explain its rush to adopt the new GPL.

SugarCRM's Professional and Enterprise edition remain under commercial licenses. SugarCRM claims 1,300 paying customers.

See its FAQ at www.sugarforge.org/content/faq/gplv3.php.

Meanwhile, Palamida is keeping track on the GPLv3 sign-ups puts the number of (mostly unsung) projects converted to the new license at 235 and those going to the Lesser GPLv3 at 12. It says there are 2,889 projects licensed as GPLv2 or later and 23 as LGPLv2.1 or later. See http://gpl3.palamida.com:8080/index.jsp for the particulars.