openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Raphael Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Mario Arias <the.clone.master@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Thanks Raphael,
>
> That was the expected technical answer,  not guts involved dogmas...
>
> We are  good at developing,  not at  legal stuff, that's why I am looking
> for feedback from the community...
>
> At least for us it is difficult to get big clients to consider OpenERP, so
> sending them back to SAP is not an option.... ;-)
>
> It is a fact that we provide the code to our clients. Now, who has the
> rights to request the code from them? Anybody that just happens to navigate
> to their OpenERP website ? Only those that are formal customers of them?
>

This is the famous legal ambiguity of the AGPL license. Like many people, I
believe a court could pick one or the other interpretation (some would say
any user should receive the code, some would say only the company). Some
believe indeed company employees are under the legal authority of the
company during their workday and cannot request the code, only the company
could.
As for users outside from the company, my feeling is that this argument is
even weaker, so I would not be surprise if a court say you should disclose
all the code to the web users.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer and blablabla.
I've seen no jurisprudence on this, I would be glad if somebody could point
to such previous court decisions.

As an integrator, we act as if the the worst decision would be taken in
court, so we don't select projects where the Python modules depending on
the OpenERP framework are expected to be not disclosed by the customer.
Now, honestly, I used Ooor several times exactly to be safe regarding this
legal aspect when the project would require it, even if it looks as a more
complex stack (I claim Rails is very mature and it's not, but it may look
so).

Best regards

-- 
Raphaël Valyi
Founder and consultant
http://twitter.com/rvalyi <http://twitter.com/#!/rvalyi>
+55 21 2516 2954
www.akretion.com