Who owns the GrapheneOS code and how is it licensed?
+ +The copyright for GrapheneOS code is entirely owned by the GrapheneOS developers + and is made available under OSI-approved Open Source licenses. The upstream licensing + is inherited for the modifications to those projects and MIT licensing is used for our + own standalone projects. GrapheneOS has never had any copyright assignment and the + developers have always owned their own contributions.
+ +The tiny portion of the code written by people under contract with the former + sponsor has not been included in the project since it was ported from Android Oreo to + Pie in 2018. This code became obsolete and was no longer useful. The vast majority of + the code from the previous era was owned by Daniel Micay, with very few exceptions. It + was never written under any contracts or employment agreements, was never assigned to + any company or organization and was the continuation of the original independent open + source project. The code was originally published under the same permissive open + source licenses that are used by GrapheneOS today. Only a small portion of this + historical code is actually still in use today. Most has become obsolete or has been + replaced by rewrites taking better approaches than in the past.
+ +There was an era from September 2016 until the project split from the former + sponsor in 2018 where non-commercial usage licensing was used for revisions to the + existing permissively licensed code. This was an attempt to prop up the sponsor that + was supposed to be supporting the open source project. This did not impact ownership + of the code and Daniel Micay has relicensed the portions of the code that are used by + GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS does not contain any code based on code under non-commercial + usage licensing. Great care was taken to avoid pulling in anything that was not solely + owned by Daniel Micay, which was the case for nearly everything in the project.
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