Licensing details and links

[susiewilliams]

Sugar has made this announcement regarding the move to GPL v3 for the Community Edition (formerly known as Sugar Open Source), beginning with release 5.0.

You can find out more information regarding this announcment and what it means to developers, administrators, and others by reading the FAQ, posted here.

Please post your questions and discussion regarding licensing in this forum.

[TheTick]

I'm curious as to why a license which doesn't appear to be OSI approved (v3) is going to be used. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php seems to indicate (as of June 26th GMT -5) that the GPL v2 is the latest OSI approved version of the GPL. It's your software and all of that, I'm just curious about this bit really.

[andydreisch]

Hi TheTick, we embrace GPL v3 in part due to its being a modern license, confident that it will be widely embraced, and that it offers protection and recognition for Sugar community developers. We believe it will help us grow our community and is right in line with the FOSS approach embodied in the Sugar Community Edition.

If you look at our project's history, we have always made licensing decisions based on the principles of growing and protecting the community. We believe that the GPL v3 will be the best license to achieve this goal going forward.

Andy

[TheTick]

Thanks for clarifying the position. That makes sense, albeit you could do the same by using the v2 and then going to v3 when it's OSI approved I suppose. Thanks.

[johnsbrn]

If Sugarcrm CE is GPL, then aren't you required to also provide the source for Sugarcrm Professional and Enterprise since they are obviously derived works?

[andydreisch]

Hi johnsbrn, thanks for the question. It’s a good one and we’ll likely add it to the FAQ.

You’re probably aware that Sugar owns the copyright to all our code and that we elect to offer a subset of the code as the Community Edition under GPLv3 and supersets of the code under a commercial license for the commercial editions – Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise.

In order for a derived work to be created the code must first be licensed under GPLv3. Because we own the copyright for the code, Sugar Professional and Enterprise editions do not derive from a code set licensed under GPLv3. Put another way, it’s not as if we receive Sugar CE under GPLv3 from us, modify it to extend capabilities found only in Sugar Professional and Enterprise, then turn around and offer them under a commercial license.

I hope this clarifies matters. Thanks for the question.

Andy

[uji]

If an external contributor improves the Community Edition (for instance, fixing a bug) can this improvement be incorporated into the Professional and Enterprise editions without breaking the GPLv3?

As long as I understood the contributor holds the property of the improvements although being enforced to redistribute it under the GPLv3.

In this case SugarCRM does not hold the property of that piece of code any more and cannot apply the dual-licensing model to it.

Will this make the CE better than the Professional and Enterprise Editions soon?

How does SugarCRM deals with this issue? Does SugarCRM require the contributor to give back the copyright in order to have the modification incorporated into the CE?

Thanks

[susiewilliams]

All contributions are accepted under the terms of the Sugar Contribution Agreement. You can learn more about the contribution process by visiting this page.

[ruchida]

If an external contributor improves the Community Edition (for instance, fixing a bug) can this improvement be incorporated into the Professional and Enterprise editions without breaking the GPLv3?

No, I don't think this is possible.

As long as I understood the contributor holds the property of the improvements although being enforced to redistribute it under the GPLv3.

Yes, I think so too. That's what GPL admits.

In this case SugarCRM does not hold the property of that piece of code any more and cannot apply the dual-licensing model to it.

I think so.

Will this make the CE better than the Professional and Enterprise Editions soon?

Yes if the community has coordinators, contributors, solid code management, etc.

How does SugarCRM deals with this issue? Does SugarCRM require the contributor to give back the copyright in order to have the modification incorporated into the CE?

SugarCRM can not take those codes without getting the Sugar Contribution Agreement signed by developers.

[onepoint]

Hi,

I would like to know if open source version of Sugar CRM could be used by anyone to customize as per the customer need and the deployment. Most of the functionalities provided by professional edition is freely aviable in sugarforge community. So, why to go for professional edition?

It looks the professional and entreprise could only be afforded by big companies only due to number of user's restriction. I suppose, users could be anyone inlcuding employees of a company.

Regards,
A