Going GNU AGPL 3

[Piotr Szotkowski]

We’re happy to announce that CiviCRM 2 will be licensed under the freshly-released GNU Affero General Public License Version 3.

The reasons why we went with the Affero GPL license since the beginning of CiviCRM are detailed on our License FAQs page, but the short of it is that the GNU GPL 2 license does not treat software distributed as a service the same way as it treats software distributed in other forms (notably, in binary). If CiviCRM was distributed under GNU GPL 2, anyone could modify it and offer the modified version as a closed service, without offering their patches.

Unfortunately, releasing CiviCRM 1 under AGPL meant we couldn’t freely use GNU GPL 2-licensed code (we couldn’t ‘combine that code into a single work’ with CiviCRM). Switching the license to GNU AGPL 3 means we can now freely use any code licensed under GNU GPL 3, as well as licensed under ‘GNU GPL 2 or later’.

As of revision 12458 on trunk (to become later CiviCRM 2.0), all of the CiviCRM codebase is licensed under GNU AGPL 3.