CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My client's organization is very interested in using civicrm but will require significant enhancements / investments.  They are prepared to fund these and contribute them back to the community but concerned about the ownership of the source code. Would you please help clarify some issues for me:

1. In the About section, there is mention of the 501c3 non-profit Social Source Foundation.  Apparently the copyright ownership is owned by David Greenberg as CiviCRM LLC. Can you please confirm this is accurate? What is the role of the Social Source Foundation?

2. I found a discussion on your site http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,12958.msg55651.html#msg55651 which indicates an intention to migrate to the license to a non-profit entity.  Has such migration taken place? If not, is it planned?

3. Have you provided any exceptions to the current AGPL such as allowing a company to use the software without distributing source code? Do you disclose any commercial arrangements involving civicrm?

Apologies if these issues are covered elsewhere, but clearly a commercial ownership of the civicrm copyright introduces uncertainty in its long term viability and the possibility, albeit remote, of commercially exploiting the contributions of community contributions.

Regards,
Peter Palin

Xavier, thank you for your prompt response.  All very valid points.  From reading the site information its clear the leadership and owners have demonstrated the best of intentions, however there are many open-source projects that have been commercially influenced.  Take SugarCRM for example; there is a limited community version but a more prominent and powerful commercial version.  New features released by the copyright holders (a commercial organization) are contributed to the commercial variant, not the community version - Will that be the model for CiviCRM ? 

Our concern is that having a commercial entity (ie, David Greenberg) own the license, he can be commercially influenced at the expense of the community.  Also, anyone who makes a code contribution does so under the Academic Free License, not GPL so CiviCRM LLC can effectively own / commercialize it.  There are countless examples of open-source projects changing direction due to commercial influences.

There are many scenarios that could  dramatically change the future of CiviCRM if the ownership is held with a commercial entity.  That is not to say that commercialization is a bad thing, but "free", "open-source" can be quite misleading and ambiguous.  The copyright owner is the only one who can distribute his own work under any other license, if he wishes, regardless of having distributed a version under the GPL.

While you are right that the community could "fork" a version of the code, it would still be bound by the AGPL license, would not be able to use the CiviCRM trademark and wouldn't have the leadership, financial support, and infrastructure that the current group has.  Its very unlikely that a fork would be successful.

Ultimately, we are seeking transparency as part of a due diligence effort.  If the copyright were transferred to the Free Software Foundation as suggested in the mentioned forum post, we would have greater confidence that its future and leadership would be in the best interest of the community.