More questions than answers about making SugerCRM my own

[cowanj]

Hello. I work for a DMS (dealership management system) software provider. Our DMS software is currently used in over 1000 automotive dealerships (both franchise and independent dealerships). We lack a good CRM module in our DMS suite. Generic CRM solutions like SugarCRM and Saleforce don’t work for automotive dealers.

SugarCRM has a lot of the capabilities we need but would have to be customized and redeveloped in many areas. It would have to be transformed into a new CRM application basically geared towards automotive and powersport dealers. Obviously an integration module would also have to be developed to move data between the DMS and the “new” automotive CRM application.

Would this be legal under the license agreement? Could we sell the module and/or charge for maintenance/support? Do you think I would be better served developing a CRM application from scratch rather than modifying SugarCRM?

Thank you.

[hileon]

I think this is allowed by GPL v3, there are lots of this kind of modules in www.sugarexchange.com .
But it should not be shipped with SugarCRM, it should be shipped alone.
If you ship it with SugarCRM community edition, you should open this module as open source too.
If you want to ship it with SugarCRM commercial edition, you should contract with sugar for commercial license.

This is just my understanding of GPL v3 and sugarcrm commercial license.

[eggsurplus]

The short answer is yes you can sell a customized version of Sugar specialized for a specific market. You can definitely also offer support, training, and hosting for it. Since Sugar is released under the GPLv3 the automotive dealers would technically have rights to the source code and could redistribute it if desired to do so if they hosted it themselves. I don't believe they would actually want to do this as it's no where near to their core business to do so. I also don't believe that the GPLv3 requires this if you were to simply provide hosting of the customized version of Sugar. I could be wrong about this if it is hosted though. Not sure on the specifics there. You'll want to review the GPL here to find your answer in that regards: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Also, a big misconception is that since it is under GPLv3 that Joe Schmoo from nowhere can come off the street and require that you hand over the source code for your customizations. The GPLv3 DOES NOT require this.

As far customizing Sugar for the automotive industry this is a common practice for this software. There are a good number of partners that market for a specific industry.