Opensourcing CMaker5

Posted At : November 3, 2008 10:27 PM | Posted By : Admin
Related Categories: Main,CMaker5

Hello,

Over the past 2 years we have developed an in-house ERP system for a local manufacturing company.

OK, this is not a SAP or JD Edwards killer but it is a nice ERP based on MySQL, ColdFusion 8 and Adobe AIR.

It features many interesting modules:

Orders management Shipping management (with overseas container shipping support) Invoicing Inventory management Product management (with Categories and white label support) Multi-Warehouse support MRP Customers/warehouses Reports Multi-language product description etc, etc etc

I am considering opensourcing portions of CMaker5. I say portions because I'd like to contribute a subset of CMaker5 to the CF community and offer to customers the more advanced portions of the software along with professional support and custom development.

I do not know where to start and I'd like to have some hints about bringing software to the open source landscape. What are the implications ? What licensing should bind the opensource portion of CMaker5. What are the legal implications?

If you have sugestions, hints or pointers please drop me a line !!

Thanks

Yves

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There are a number of open source licenses that will prevent you from being able to sell any commercial versions of the software. So obviously you want to stay away from those. The GPL is one of them. The Lesser-GPL (LGPL) on the other hand is not and neither is the Open-BSD license which I chose for the onTap framework. I had originally chosen the LGPL but switched to the BSD license because the LGPL doesn't allow you to encrypt the source of the portion that's in the OS community. The BSD license allows you to encrypt it - it merely insists that you disclose what OS code you're using so people know and can go get it and look at it separately (although you also may have modified it). I actually have no intention of encrypting my software - I only switched to the BSD license because I noticed that some folks have some fairly strong opinions about the LGPL describing the non-encryption requirement as "an infection".
# Posted By ike | 11/3/08 10:51 PM
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