On copyright, some files had or have an incorrect copyright
- From: Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>
- To: tinymail-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: On copyright, some files had or have an incorrect copyright
- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:37:25 +0100
I would like to repeat in clear language that every code-file of the
(current) tinymail framework is LGPL
If at the top of the file it by accident said or says "GPL" then that's
a bug that you can fix by sending me a patch or that you can notify me
of. If this is legally incorrect, the copyright owner of that file
(usually/always that is me), hereby grants you the permission to change
the license to LGPL (and only to LGPL).
Unless it's a file in libtinymail-camel/camel-lite/camel. In that case,
the copyright is owned by the people who brought us Camel. Although I so
far haven't found a single file of it that isn't correctly marked as
LGPL.
Autotools often also incorrectly overrides the COPYING file. Any such
change was by accident and non-indented. I hereby officially state, as
the main author and often the only author of a lot of the tinymail
files: the copyright *is* LGPL, not GPL.
If people want this statement written on paper with my signature under
the statement, then they can write to me and I will fax or postal-mail
you a signed version of the statement.
I'm indeed dead serious about the LGPL copyright, indeed. :-)
I'm also planning to make sure that people can legally implement closed
source implementations of the many interfaces of tinymail. With LGPL
this should already mostly be legally 100% possible.
Although such implementation can, as far as I know the LGPL license,
legally only either statically or dynamically link with the existing
current framework, I want to make sure that even if it would be needed
to have a binary piece inside of the framework, although for now I don't
think there's any technical reason or anything that makes it impossible
to do everything you want as a to-link library, that you can legally do
this.
I understand that on mobile devices it might not be practical and maybe
often unusual or impossible with your build environment to use either
shared objects or static libraries.
It's my opinion however, as the author of most of the tinymail
framework, that this shouldn't prevent you from utilizing tinymail.
The LGPL copyright and license are mostly for the existing code. I do,
however, STRONGLY ENCOURAGE people and companies to contribute their
enhancements and implementations to the project.
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