Customizing Sugar CRM for clients?

[dakman1]

I am a real estate webmaster and was looking to offer customized SugarCRM and Hosting solutions to help my clients better manage leads...

I read the SugarCRM License (SPL) and it mentioned that you can't sell deriviate works or SugarCRM which I can respect. But we can provide hosting, installation, support, training and template customization.

http://www.sugarforge.org/content/op...icense-faq.php

Questions

1. According to the FAQ, is if you modify sugar crm source code in anyway (besides templates, lang packs) you have to publicly make it available since its a derivative work.... What does this mean?

2. Does anyone who customizes Sugar, (including programmers, partner companies and even SugarCRM's programmers) who charge X an hour, have to make their clients' customizations available to the public?

3. If so, Where would we have to post our "derivative works" publicly? Do we have to promote them on sugarforge? Or can we just keep the source code and offer it for free to those who request them via email or other means?

4. Also, if our clients (yours, ours and sugar partners) have paid us to do the PHP programmming to make the customizations how come we have to make them publicly available when they could be potentially confidential to a company?

Thanks for your help and I can't wait to introduce my clients to the benefits of Sugar...

[stevec]

Hi,

This is my interpretation, but I might be wrong.

1. According to the FAQ, is if you modify sugar crm source code in anyway (besides templates, lang packs) you have to publicly make it available since its a derivative work.... What does this mean?

In the FAQ, there is a definition of a derived work http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/open-sou...cense-faq.html (section 6)

So if you take any code that is already published using the sugar license, and base new work on that, then that too has to be covered by that license. Apart from language packs and config file changes, the only thing that would be covered as non-derived would be if you wrote a complete new module - not based on an existing one - though you can use the APIs of sugarcrm to have your new module communicate with other modules.

2. Does anyone who customizes Sugar, (including programmers, partner companies and even SugarCRM's programmers) who charge X an hour, have to make their clients' customizations available to the public?

That's my interpretation too.

3. If so, Where would we have to post our "derivative works" publicly? Do we have to promote them on sugarforge? Or can we just keep the source code and offer it for free to those who request them via email or other means?

I'm not sure here, but for a lot of open source code, the code can be provided on your website - or on request. I don't think there's a requirement to use sugarforge.

4. Also, if our clients (yours, ours and sugar partners) have paid us to do the PHP programming to make the customizations how come we have to make them publicly available when they could be potentially confidential to a company?

But then, hypothetically, someone could take the existing open source, make minor changes to each module - and then keep the code to themselves as their own, This nature of open source, ensures code stays open source. What a 3rd party is paying for is modification of an existing code-base. If they were to pay for development of a CRM system from scratch
or mods to a proprietary code-base it would cost them an awful lot more. That's their trade-off.

Saying that though, if the function you are trying to develop is confidential, you could develop a totally original module and it wouldn't be covered by the 'derivative' clause.

Hope that helps