CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi:
I have a client interested in doing a lot with Civi but they are concerned about the licensing.  It looks like CiviCRM Copyright is owned by CiviCRM LLC (a commercial enterprise) but advised by Social Source Foundation a 501c3.  The concern is that at some point the CiviCRM LLC could decide to commercialize it and restrict the licensing - perhaps requiring the customer to pay for upgrades.  I know this is an extremely unlikely scenario, but given that civi is generally targeting non-profits, and many volunteers are contributing to it, why isn't the Social Source Foundation the copyright owner?  Is there some other guarantee that the future of civicrm will be GPL and not commercialized?  Any suggestions on how i can convince the client? BTW- they are also reluctant to display the required footer for end users.

Got it.  Yes, we did look at the AGPL license, and I believe they even sent it to their attorney for review.  Have you (would you) considered putting the copyright ownership in a non-profit or assigning it to the Free Software Foundation (like GNU, etc.) so there is some protection for the continuity of the open nature of the software?  Obviously, it depends on your future intention / direction - but from everything I can tell it looks like your intention is to keep it open , free, non-profit, etc.  Hope you don't take any offence to the inquiry, I am personally a big, enthusiastic fan of everything you are doing and have achieved but I'm also trying to convince my client to use civicrm and for some reason they (their lawyer i think) have a fear that somehow this will bite them.