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Portions and Derivatives

spacecowboy

176 posts

Joined
11/21/2007

Portions and Derivatives
Posted: 28 Nov 07 9:57 AM

During my investigations into Splendid I decided to compare the file system and codebases of Splendid and Sugar - in doing so it started to occur to me that while Splendid is obviously a port, not much of the original Sugar CRM code remains. This being the case I would suggest that under section 2.1 of the SPL, Splendid is technically a derivative of Sugar and as such is not explicitly covered by their SPL. I started thinking about this mainly because of the "Powered by SugarCRM" logo - is it actually "Powered by Sugar"? or is it "Powered by Splendid and Derived from Sugar"?

What i'm getting at is that some developers may wish to remove the copyright notice on every page if they are re-packaging Splendid as an OEM. If Splendid was under it's own SPL a clause could be included that grants clients who buy the Professional Licence permission to remove the copyright notice as long as the standard notice appears both in the source code and, say on an "About Solution" page. This would certainly be a compelling reason for ourselves, and no doubt many other organisations, to purchase the Pro License. (Obviously the copyright notice in the open source version would still be mandatory.)

Another example of what I mean is here: http://phpnuke.org/modules.php?name=Commercial_License (One of the many Nuke family members)

support

2094 posts

Joined
1/3/2006

Re: Portions and Derivatives
Posted: 28 Nov 07 10:19 PM

Your observations are correct. In fact, with each new release, we strive to replace generic HTML code that was cut-and-paste from an early SugarCRM with a true ASP.NET implementation. It is debatable whether HTML is code or is formatting, but we perfer to play-it-safe and include the Sugar copyright on any page that includes HTML copied from SugarCRM.

The one key area that we have yet to address is the images and style sheets. As long as we include the Sugar copyright, we can continue to include their images and style sheets. At some point we may create our own art work, but for now we perfer to focus on features.

spacecowboy

176 posts

Joined
11/21/2007

Re: Portions and Derivatives
Posted: 29 Nov 07 5:10 AM Modified By spacecowboy on 11/29/2007 5:17:50 AM)

That's very interesting actually - so if a "friendly" designer was to submit a new set of images and stylesheets for the open source product there would be no remaining code or artefacts that could be attributed to Sugar?

I believe in this case it falls under the "3.7 Larger Works" category in the SPL. I will get our lawyer to have a look at this and report back. I believe then that the option to remove the copyright line *could* theoretically be added as a clause in the SplendidPro License. That of course is a decision for Splendid Inc. to make!

In the meantime my feeling is that in SplendidOS the "Initial Developer" should still be credited - even if there is no legal requirement to do so, mainly because it's not really in the spirit of open source.

Play-it-safe is the best option for now - I would suggest that HTML is code and format is an output of that code so it would be included under the SPL. There's other stuff that would also be considered "Covered Code" for example Stored Procedures...

I have noticed that some things are coded a bit archaicly - like the tabs are in tables rather than sliding doors... so a HTML rewrite is certainly an option. Indeed that would be a requirement on our part, and again something we could feed directly back to SplendidOS.

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