We are pleased to see that the pace of GPLv3 adoption is on the rise. More and more companies which once sat and watched finally fall under the spell of the 'cattle effect'. They also come to realise that what was being said in the press was not truthful. Ciaran from the FSFE sums it up pretty nicely:

So, in review, Samba's GPLv3 transition went well. Then SugarCRM ditched their custom licence and moved to GPLv3, which, as I said, is one way in which GPLv3 tackles licence proliferation. And now GCC and 286 other projects have made the transition, according to Palamida's GPLv3 counter. It seems that GPLv3 transitions are going quite smoothly.

In fact, it seems that many commentators have been surprised (and some have surely been disappointed) by the lack of major problems. There is a vacuum of bad press, which is why Slashdot has resorted to printing hallucinations, and InformationWeek can only publish bad news by inventing it. All in all, I'd chalk that down as a success for the eighteen months of hard work that was the GPLv3 consultation process.

Guess what? Another prominent project has just joined the wave of adoption.

The developers of the Citadel messaging and collaboration system are pleased to announce that we are now releasing all of our software under version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

For those who do not know, this is a fairly large project. This symbolises the notion that GPLv3 and businesses co-exist in harmony (and even thrive in it). Ask Alfresco.

Q: Has the move to GPL for Alfresco been a positive experience?

It's been a very positive experience. We saw a pretty healthy uptick in terms of new contributions coming into the Alfresco community moving to GPL. It has also helped to simplify the perception of Alfresco in terms of is it really open source or not. It also probably helped to simplify our OEM business, as well, which is a healthy piece of business.