Licensing requirements

[JoeMurray]

On an imap2soap.pl discussion about a year ago there was a back and forth about AGPL, GPL, GPL v2, GPL v3, AFL, etc. I don't know this stuff and just want to be doing the right thing. One point of Fen's that caught my eye was that there is a desire in some parts reflected in certain licenses to require people to contribute back any changes they make to web apps. I know there were some issues getting Drupal provisioning software put together by one firm put back into the community, though it was not extensively reused once it did released with a FLOSS license of some sort.

I'd like to put together a provisioning system (haven't thought about what or how) that would create Drupal / CiviCRM installations when people sign-up on a website. One of the offerings will involve data licensed for several thousand annually from the Canadian government, data my firm will be aggregating and keeping up to date from public sources (this is a big value add for expected customers), as well as some custom modules interacting with and sitting on top of Drupal/CiviCRM. What if any licensing considerations / preferences of CiviCRM folks are there for something like this?

[Matt2000]

I'd also like to have a better understanding of these issues. Can anyone enlighten?

[Donald Lobo]

am not a lawyer, so all disclaimers apply .

basically different projects have different criteria:

a. drupal needs all modules as GPL if they are part of Drupal CVS. I suspect like Joomla, Drupal will make it a requirement that ALL modules have to be GPL sometime soon. This

b. CiviCRM needs code to be licensed using AFL if it will be part of CiviCRM. We've blogged about this in the past as to the reasons why etc. If you need very specific legal answers, you might need to chat with our lawyer (Larry Rosen from rosenlaw)

c. CiviCRM uses AGPL since we do like the network effects of AGPL (compared to GPL). Some members of our team are much stronger GPL advocates than others. I don't think there are lots of cases where folks have not used us because of the license (only one case that i know of).

d. Ultimately, you should choose a license that you are comfortable with and meets the needs of your users. You should definitely go with an OSI approved license, rather than making your own. To a large extent, licensing discussions are similar to talk about religion. Everyone feels that their chosen license is superior

lobo