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.
-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.
+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 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.
+ +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.
+