SugarCRM's Community Edition 5.0 Beta Released Today Under GPLv3 License

CUPERTINO, Calif. – SugarCRM Inc. has said that Sugar Community Edition 5.0 beta is ready for download and testing by the Sugar community. Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is being released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation.

"We are excited to ship Beta 1 of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 under the GPLv3," said John Roberts, CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM. "We believe the GPLv3 will become the global standard license for free and open source software."

The Sugar community is comprised of over 10,000 developers located in five continents who have already contributed more than 400 CRM extensions based on the core Sugar code on http://www.sugarforge.org/.

The adoption of GPLv3 has been welcomed by the Sugar community and will enable faster development cycles, more code contributions and additional beta testing feedback, which ultimately increases the quality of CRM for businesses world-wide.

"We have worked closely with SugarCRM to ensure that their Sugar Community Edition applies GPLv3 correctly," said Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation. "We welcome the release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0 under GPLv3 and we believe it sets the standard for how enterprise applications can take advantage of the benefits the license provides." More information about GPLv3 can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

Sugar Community Edition Beta Release Available Today

Sugar Community Edition 5.0 introduces innovative platform features, new CRM functionality and community development tools. The beta release is available for download today at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/downloads/. The 5.0 beta release is also available via an on-demand temporary trial at http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/Sugar5.0_Beta1_CP. The General Availability release of Sugar 5.0 is targeted for the end of September.