Greg Troxel writes: > I looked at the download page (because of a previous message) and was > surprised to see an iOS link, because I had the impression Jami was GPL > rather than some permissive license. I looked at the repo and sure > enough GPL3.
Yes, Jami is licensed under GPLv3+. > As I understand Apple's app store terms, users who receive software have > to agree to not distribute it all, let alone modify it, and this is > incompatible with the GPL. > > I looked at CONTRIBUTING, and there's no CLA (yay!) so this seems to be > the usual inbound=outbound (yay again!). So there are likely many > copyright holders, rather than SFL being the sole holder, and all of > them would need to consent to dual licensing. > > So I wonder if someone could explain how this works. Do app store users > who receive an ios binary have the legal right to resdistribute it? Are > they prevented from doing so by technical means? > > Is there some proprietary dual licensing scheme happening? Actually, the Jami team does kindly ask that folks contributing a 'nontrivial' amount of changes (more than 15 lines of code, cumulative for each contributor) to assign the copyright for their changes to Savoir-faire Linux (perhaps this should be clarified / better documented). I believe that's how the app store issue is sidestepped. Below is an excerpt of the copyright assignment agreement letter we send to contributors contributing 'nontrivial' amount of changes: ,---- | SFL mostly focuses on support services and custom development, but | it also explores the possibility of selling GPL exceptions, so even | as Jami remains Free Software under the GPLv3 or later, SFL could | offer, to a specific client, to re-license a part of Jami for their | specific purposes. | | Two articles by rms on selling exceptions and copyright assignment: | - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html | - https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright | | SFL pledges that every improvement to Jami made by SFL will always | be redistributed under the GPL, as the vision remains to build a | Free and universal distributed communication platform. `---- > Thanks, > Greg > Hope this helps. Best, amin
