licensing fees for Civicrm

[Zjsplain]

I plan on using civicrm to create websites for certain organizations so they can track donations and fees.  If I charge a fee for installing the website will I be violating the Civicrm licensing agreement?  In addition if my website docks a percentage of the donations that has been agreed upon by myself and the organization is that in violation of the Civicrm licensing agreement?  I plan on doing a substantial amount of customization to the civicrm model.  Lastly will I need to release the source code if I am only releasing websites to certain companies?

[xavier]

Hi,

You should consult a lawyer to get a more definitive answer.

Plenty of companies sell services around aGPL products, and all CC processors charge a % on the donations.

But indeed, you should make available the modifications on the source code of an aGPL software. In practice, playing nice with the community tend to help our businesses rather than hurt them.

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[Erik Hommel]

Agree with Xaiver, releasing the source code is not only a question of 'need to' but more of: sharing our stuff tends to multiply our possibilities? So sharing is not something you HAVE to do and is dangerous, but something you want to do because it is profitable :-)

[Chris Burgess]

I'm not a lawyer, assume what I say is wild speculation and hearsay. (Or heresy.)

There are no license fees for CiviCRM.

You're fine to make money from CiviCRM, including by charging fees for use etc. Requirements are that you make source available to users, that you provide the AGPL license and notice, and that you state the changes you've made.

AGPL is intended to close the "loophole" for application service providers who might use OSS to deploy a commercial service and not share the source code. It's one of the more opinionated licenses with regard to sharing your source - by comparison the GPL permits people to, say, run a pay-per-view Drupal site with contrib modules only, and not provide any source disclosure to the users.

See http://choosealicense.com/licenses/ and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License for more (brief) info.

If your software depends on (is based on or can't operate without) an AGPL product, my understanding is that the license "infects" your product also. This is a "restrictive" (vs "permissive") license.

CiviCRM's license is quite relaxed about you making gazillions of dollars using the software for free, but cares deeply about whether you share the code you're building on.

(a week or two later, tldrlegal.com appeared - it's quite good!)

https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-(agpl-3.0)

[Zjsplain]

First, I want to thank all of you for your input I truly appreciate it.  Mr. Burgess I visited the "choosealicense" link you sent and I wanted to know if when I start using civicrm am I required to use the AGPL agreement or can I choose an alternative one like the Apache V2 license?

Second to Xavier if you wouldn't mind will you elaborate on the percentage that CC takes from donations and subsequent licensing fees ect?  Basically does Civicrm require a cut from what I make from each website?

Again thank you all!

[xavier]

Yes, you don't choose the licence, it's the copyright holders that do and agpl3 it is.

Civi the organisation doesn't take any cut on any donation. that's the various providers that might.

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