CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Sorry, we've not had the time, energy or resources to make any progress with this. Hopefully this year will be a bit less hectic

We can accept major donations for CiviCRM via a couple of other partner organizations

lobo

Hi,

Could you fund (part of) the legal work needed for that?

Otherwise, you are aware that civi is one of the "blessed top priority" projects from the FSF and they are using it for their need as well? They have spend a awful lot of time to be sure all the licencing is ok... and that agpl3 is a licence they support and think is good enough. If they are willing to "take the risk", I feel pretty confident that it's "free software enough".

Knowing lobo dgg & co, I strongly doubt they have any intention to go all Oracle on civi, but even if they sell civicrm llc to another org that wants to try something like that, the community is big enough to pull a jenkin/libreoffice/mariadb. Given that it's agpl3 instead of gpl2, that will even be easier to force whomever to release the "premium code" they'd want to sell.

We'll discuss endlessly about what's the new name, fork and call it a day.

X+

I did lose a client over this issue.

Then you have lost one that is more sensitive about licensing & free software than the FSF!

Xavier, I understand that looking at the history and character of the CiviCRM license owners
is important and personally hold Lobo and David in the highest esteem (The whole Civi team are a bunch of ROCK STARS!) , however the bottom line is that license ownership is a big deal and it is held in a for profit, commercial LLC. 

They don't own the licence, only the copyright. The licence allows everyone to use and modify and share bla, and forbid anyone, including the copyright owner, to stop anyone doing it.

This will definitely put off some people who want their code and financial contributions to be made exclusively to a non-profit entity.

So far, we have either assigned the copyright code to civicrm, or kept the copyright and Licensed to CiviCRM under the Academic Free License version 3.0.

As for the donation, you don't have to give to the llc, they are non-profit in the community that can do the work.

Might be easier to discuss it with a concrete example of a sizeable contribution, we are a bit bikeshedding here

  A fork under a different name is possible, but it's a risk to the viability of the product (so many open source projects have gone bad due to this.) and let's face it, everyone would lose.

Sure it would be a tough time and we'd all rather avoid it. However, the lastest examples (libreoffice/jenkins/mariadb) seem quite successful.

If the legal costs are the issue, how about a MIH to put transfer to the FSF?

I'm not sure the FSF would be even interested in the first place, and not sure either that it would be a better solution than a separate foundation in the Netherlands or something.

Point is, they are plenty of options, and that's a complicated analysis and a long and important discussion to have, and so far, the existing solution is good enough given who runs the llc and how it has been taking care of the project & that the community have considered more important to work on for the project.

As for the transfer, lobo's latest position:

The migration has not yet taken place, but migrating the copyright to an entity is definitely still on the plate. Its just not super high on the priority list currently (more due to time considerations than anything else).

And right now, we are days before code freeze for 4.2 that will include a lot of really nice improvements... but that tend to keep everyone busy enough with code & tests...

X+