Customizing and extending
Earlier in this book, we presented CiviCRM's open source licensing as one of the chief selling points of the software. Open source means the source code is readily available and can be altered or added to without infringing on the license. In short, it means you can open up the hood and tinker with it to your heart's content.
Of course, tinkering isn't really what benefits you. It's the ability to truly customize, expand, add on, restructure, or do whatever you need to make sure that this software suits the needs of your organization. Then you can share with the community so that they can benefit from your efforts to improve, document, support, and extend the software—and in turn, you can benefit from what other's share. This is the true value of open source. Unlike proprietary closed source software, you're not wholly dependent on the roadmap plans of the company that owns the software (crossing your fingers in hope that they...
