Evolution: Taking forward...

["Srinivasa Ragavan" <sragavan novell com>]

Hello guys,

We have had a set of problems that we are carrying around for some time like :

      * Copyright assignments, which is not the best way looking for the future of Evolution. It sucks and sort of limits contributions to Evolution and we wanted to drop it.
      * The current licensing incompatibility issues of Evolution with Samba4/libmapi (GPLv3). Evolution needs to link with libmapi/samba4 for the new mapi based connector being developed for Exchange 2007.
 
So here is the plan :

      * Drop Evolution copyright assignments and make it really easy to contribute to Evolution
      * Move Evolution licensing to  "LGPL v2 and LGPL v3" to let us re-use the code more easily around the platform.  This also moves us closer to Thunderbird's MPL/LGPL model. 

We think this is good for Evolution and (of course) we continue to invest in Evolution. We are also working to ensure we have the rights to re-license all of the code. We will do the licensing/header changes as we audit the code ownership situation.

It would be really helpful if you can post a public/explicit mail with permissions to do it, or code pointers - if you think you wrote a piece of Evolution code & object.

We are really excited about this and we feel this would really help Evolution a lot. We need your support now for making this change and to take Evolution to great heights.

Thanks for your contributions and support.

-Srini.