Magento

Hi i am a php developer and i have a great idea for a new social network / community ecommerce website. Now in order for this to get off to a good start and quickly i would like to use magento as the base to develop my new code on top of.  i may write the entire website from scratch in the future with my own large team of developers but to get this thing started i need a solid ecommerce framework to work on.

Can you please tell me if your license would allow me to do this?

the administration of the site will always only be used by me and my team i just want to write code for the site to give it new features that will allow for social networking and other things that are unique combined with the base ecommerce functionality of magento.

If i write new modules and change existing code in magento will i have to make a copy of my new site available for anyone to download who uses the site?

is this the same for the community edition and the enterprise edition?

If i do have to release the new code, how can i build my new site with magento as the core and not have to - for instance if i left the magento core as it is and just interfaced with the api instead of changing code in the core - what about new separate modules are these seen as derivative or outside work?

I look forward to your reply on this thank you very much
Michael

Do you plan to sell this future advanced community website engine as a product?

If not, feel free to build your website using Magento.

Hello Turnkeye and thank you for your reply. So yes the last thing i want to do is sell the code for the system that im building as its the single website service which i want like facebook.

Now to be clear if i download and use the community edition and i make changes to the core will i have to make these changes available to my website users?

im not selling the software or charging people people to use the software like a hosted saas service (only my company would have access o the administration) Im just making changes to the system to add some social networking things on it and enabling any user to contribute in a specific way to the products sold on the site (which they would earn commision for).

There are already at least 3 topics with the same matter:

About license
e-commerce portal
Using magento as a base development framework for an advanced community website

And nobody jumps in to answer a very important question.

I can see 2 possibilities:

1- nobody knows the answer;
2- nobody wants to bring the truth about the OSL3.0

I´d really appreciate if somebody with credentials could jump in and help the community.

Regards,
--
Ricardo Auada

The way I look at it, you could modulise the whole thing, overwrite certain function files when needed rather than trying to taking the source code and making it what you will.

I’m pretty sure the licensing of Magento prevents someone taking their source code, rewriting a couple of files and basically rebranding. Wouldn’t you get offended if someone ripped off a book you’ve spent 5 years writing and tried to make it their own.

Look for modulisation and atleast then you’ll be able to upgrade in the future with Magento. That way all your work could be recorded and sold on as well if you needed. Pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to sell on a CE version of Magento with a few modifications.

Anyways, I’d email Varien directly to discuss the matter further.