Inheriting or disinheriting GPL license conditions

[Greg Soper]

Hi

I do extensive work with SugarCRM - only on the Open Source version of it.

SugarCRM, from Release 5.0 is GPL 3. Previous releases were the Sugar 
Public License (SPL) which was essentially GPL2 with attribution clauses 
and was not recognised by OSI.

There is a vendor of a SugarCRM fork, based on a GPL2/SPL licensed 
version of SugarCRM who has heavily modified the application.

This vendor takes advantage of services distribution omissions in GPL2 
which allows IP in modified versions to be retained if the software is 
distributed as a service.

However, the vendor also distributes an "on-premise" or physical version 
of the modified application. This on-premise version is covered by a 
proprietary license that forbids distribution of any vendor written 
code, but allows distribution of the original SugarCRM written code.

If I remember correctly from a seminar I attended a couple or ten years 
ago .... if you modify and distribute GPL2 code, the whole code base is 
covered by GPL2 ... the changes inherit the GPL2 license conditions.

Can anyone educate me here?

thanks in anticipation.
-- 

Greg Soper
Managing Director
SalesAgility.com Ltd.

SugarCRM Experts

*email:* greg.soper at salesagility.com
*skype:* greg.soper
*web:* http://www.salesagility.com
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*mob:* 07740 982083

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