split out copyright / licensing section

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Daniel Micay 2020-04-11 00:26:08 -04:00
parent 9d0302d526
commit af216f19a1

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that they are actively trying to sabotage it through any means necessary while
continuing to profit from our work.</p>
<p>The copyright for GrapheneOS code is entirely owned by the GrapheneOS developers
and is made available under OSI-approved Open Source licenses. The tiny portion of the
code written by people under contract with the former sponsor was removed from the
project due to the code becoming obsolete, long before it was known as GrapheneOS. The
code that remains from the previous era is entirely owned by Daniel Micay, 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 and the copyright ownership is largely
irrelevant due to it being an open source project. The upstream licensing is inherited
for modifications to those projects and MIT licensing is used for our own standalone
projects. There was an era from September 2016 until the project split from the former
sponsor in mid 2018 where non-commercial usage licensing was used for revisions to the
existing open source code. This was an attempt to prop up the project's sponsor which
was not succeeding in building a business. The licensing was not the real problem and
GrapheneOS has gone back to the original open source licensing predating the misguided
sponsorship agreement. Code from that era not owned by Daniel Micay was omitted from
the project when it was ported to Android Oreo and rebranded as the AndroidHardening
project and then GrapheneOS. There is no code in GrapheneOS tainted by non-commercial
usage licensing. It was largely rewritten from scratch for Oreo and later and all the
portions based on earlier work are unquestionably owned by the developers who are free
to choose new licenses for the code.</p>
<p>This section was included here in response to the ongoing attacks on the project by
the former sponsor. It will be substantially expanded in the near future.</p>
<h2 id="copyright-and-licensing">
<a href="#copyright-and-licensing">Copyright and licensing</a>
</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 to Android Oreo 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="roadmap">
<a href="#roadmap">Roadmap</a>
</h2>