Hey all, this is probably better directed to a lawyer but I thought I’d throw it out to the community and Frappe first.
After initially pitching ERPNext to my company I’ve been given the green light to further research on what deploying ERPNext might look like for us, which has led me to further investigate the GNU licensing. Initially I wasn’t concerned about it, as I wouldn’t consider our use as “distribution”, however one aspect of what we do currently is give external manufacturers access to our systems to better manage the work orders we issues them. This happens quite often as we work with many small manufacturers that aren’t running a sophisticated setup, so to keep things easy for us we just plug them into our system. This fits into our larger company ethos of “decentralized manufacturing” where we try to manufacture our product as close to where the product needs to be as possible, and we end up managing purchasing, stock and logistics for these external manufacturers anyway, so they’re basically just fabrication capacity.
Would this use case count as distribution under the GNU license?
For me this fits within the “supplier portal” use case, i.e. a portal user that see some specific data, has login credentials, but is external to the organisation. However in terms of what we’d want to give them access too it could be a lot more than just portal access. We haven’t progressed very far with what our deployment could look like but there has been ideas thrown out of setting up mini or shadow deployments of ERPNext for external manufacturers that we control but are separate from our own ERPNext deployment. This seems like it would be distribution to me, but I’m unsure if its a gray area – we don’t charge them for this, its purely to help us manage our manufacturing, and they wouldn’t be using it if it wasn’t at our request.
The above could be a moot point if we’re happy to open source our modifications? However I’m worried about the GNU copy-left provisions affecting our design software if we were to integrate ERPNext with it. If we’re just accessing ERPNext via the API we shouldn’t have any issues with it being considered a modification? For example I would expect our design software to be automatically creating BOMs in ERPNext, pulling in stock levels etc.
Any experiences people can share around this would be appreciated (fully understanding they don’t count as legal advice) – just trying to get a grasp on whether this is manageable or completely dead-on-arrival.
– Luke