Customizing Sugar CRM

[dakman1]

I was reading the Public License FAQ.... what does this mean?

"4) What am I not allowed to do with code that is covered by the SPL?"
a. Restrict access to derived works of SugarCRM. If you make a code modification available to one person, you are required by the SPL to make that derived work freely available to everybody."

If we make modifications to our opensource version of SugarCRM do we need to make them available to everyone? How would we do this? Upload to SugarForge the version of our sugar CRM source code?

The FAQ also mentioned:adding or removing fields would be considered a deriavtive work and we have to make our field customizations etc avail to everyone?

I was reading the SPL it mentioned "Electronic Distribution Mechanism" and that any contributions/code modifications need to be on an electronic distribution mechansism? What's this?

If anyone who uses Sugar Opensource has to make their derivative works available then I guess everyone who uses opensource and customizes there app has to share those customizations with anyone. How would this work epecially if some of us are paid to do confidential customizations for clients?

[ftreml]

If we make modifications to our opensource version of SugarCRM do we need to make them available to everyone? How would we do this? Upload to SugarForge the version of our sugar CRM source code?

"making available" means to offer it for download on a website (not necessarily sugarforge), announcements to the community are not required. as far as I know.

I was reading the SPL it mentioned "Electronic Distribution Mechanism" and that any contributions/code modifications need to be on an electronic distribution mechansism? What's this?

I assume this means making it available for download or transfer it by email.

If anyone who uses Sugar Opensource has to make their derivative works available then I guess everyone who uses opensource and customizes there app has to share those customizations with anyone. How would this work epecially if some of us are paid to do confidential customizations for clients?

that's easy: if your clients want exclusive rights on the customizations, it is required to buy commercial licenses - either Sugar Pro or Sugar Enterprise. That's the same with GPLd software, where additionally it is possible to buy commercial licenses (for example: http://www.jaspersoft.com/pr_licensing.html).

[dakman1]

Thanks for your help on clarifying that... As far as changes or customizations done using the Admin area(not touching source code) like adding or removing fields do those have to be made public as well?

The FAQ says "Adding or Removing fields" is a derivative work but using sugar allows you to do these mods without having to touch source code. Would we have to make the metadata and field layout output from avail?

[stevec]

if you make changes through the config or the studio, you do not have to make these available for download - as it's not editing the source code - but the configuration. Everyone using sugar makes such changes.

Generally - with open source software - if you make change to the source code and distribute the resultant binary, you need to publish the changed source code.

It's slightly different here in that the website runs on interpreted source code rather than compiled binaries - and 'visiting' a website/application is not the same as distributing the code. I believe the license is written so that any changes made to the code and used as it's own distributed product needs to be released to the community so everyone benefits and the modifier doesn't solely benefit on the back of the work of others.

However, note the term "If you make a code modification available to one person". What this means - I
believe, and counter me if I've got this wrong - is that if you make source code modifications and sell/give the crm web service to customers or internal users, then you do not need to publish your changes. However, if you sell or give the MODIFICATIONS as source code to another company so they can set up as a crm host offering your new features, then you need to publish the mods so anybody can use the same mods.