Licensing Policy

MeeGo™ inherits the overall principles of the licensing policies of Maemo and Moblin projects, which again have targeted to be aligned with the policies of major Linux desktop distribution products. This means adopting a policy of open source software distribution and re-distribution which is largely based on extensive use of upstream open source components and their licenses as such whenever possible. MeeGo places no additional rules on top of the upstream component licenses and embraces the vast variety and multitude of licenses used by the open source community at large.

In particular, the requirement is to use licenses compatible with the OSI Open Source definition and use the software and licenses in a way that enables proprietary extensions. Users of MeeGo should be able to differentiate their MeeGo based commercial products by adding proprietary extensions on all layers of the architecture. Yet the whole MeeGo platform software available from MeeGo.com should be fully open source.

The MeeGo software stack has two major parts: the MeeGo Operating System and MeeGo User Experience subsystems. There is a difference between the license type emphasis of the two. The operating system license policy is driven by maximizing alignment with the rest of the Linux distribution community, hence a high degree of variety in licenses and effective dominance of the GNU licenses in number. The User Experience license policy, on the other hand, is driven by satisfying the needs of operating system and device vendor users of MeeGo to help them in fast adoption and in providing the best value to their customers. A policy of primarily permissive BSD-style open source licenses and secondarily copyleft licenses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) meets these needs best.

We believe that the MeeGo licensing policy is familiar, simple, and well aligned with the vast majority of the open source community. The most important thing is that this kind of policy keeps things simple from the MeeGo user point of view. It guarantees that MeeGo software is available equally for everybody, free of charge, free of extra hassle, and without any contracts beyond the traditional open source and trademark license terms of the style familiar from most mainstream open source projects.

MeeGo Operating System Software

The MeeGo Operating System consists of the Linux operating system kernel and hundreds of various middleware and utility components. The Operating System component licenses naturally follow the upstream project licenses (such as Linux kernel is under GNU GPL v2, etc...).

In a nutshell, the MeeGo Operating System licensing policy is that components must be under OSI compatible licenses.

MeeGo User Experience Subsystem Software

MeeGo provides several alternative Reference User Experience subsystems to support the human-machine interaction models and functionality specific to different devices and markets like netbooks, handsets, and TVs. License policy for the User Experience subsystems is driven by the ability of MeeGo operating system and device vendor users to access a complete turn-key software stack and to be able to differentiate their product offering, while still enjoying the benefit of a common unfragmented application platform.

In general, the software in official MeeGo Reference User Experience subsystems must be under some permissive OSI compatible license. Permissive licenses are BSD-style licenses which do not mandate code modifications to be open sourced (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_license). There are two exceptions to this policy, though. First, libraries which extend the MeeGo Operating System API, aiming to provide adaptation to the particular usage model or device segment, should be licensed under the same license with the underlying API they extend. Use of copyleft library licenses like GNU LGPL version 2.x is encouraged. The reason for this first exception is to discourage fragmenting the MeeGo API. Second, well established and mature independent applications, such as the browser, mail client, etc., can be under any OSI compatible license. The reason for this is practicality.

MeeGo Trademark

For MeeGo trademark information please visit http://meego.com/about/trademark .

Contributions

MeeGo project will neither require nor accept copyright assignment for code contributions. The principle behind this is, on the one hand, to avoid extra bureaucracy or other obstacles discouraging contributions. On the other hand, the idea is to emphasize that contributors themselves carry the rights and responsibilities associated with their code. MeeGo is a common concern of its project community and all participants should represent themselves and continuously influence the result through their own contribution.

Code contributions are encouraged to take place rather in the upstream component projects than in MeeGo. Project focus is in integrating existing upstream components into a platform release, rather than in new code development. Therefore, the objective is to minimize MeeGo patches against upstream projects and to avoid accumulating patches which serve a purpose other than releasing integration and stabilization. The MeeGo site will, however, host development of some new software components, too.

For contribution guidelines, please visit http://meego.com/about/contribution-guidelines.

Exact License Terms of MeeGo

The text on this page has provided an easy to understand overview of the MeeGo licensing policy. The MeeGo software is a Linux operating system distribution, and as such is a combination of hundreds of individual open source components, which each come with their own licenses. Exact and exhaustive license terms of the MeeGo software thus can not possibly be detailed in this page and would be quite meaningless anyway.

MeeGo software does not have any one license that would cover MeeGo as a compilation. Instead, MeeGo software is available as a sum of its constituting components and their respective licenses. The license terms of the constituting components can be found from the source code archives of each component in question, typically under the root directory in a file with name "COPYING" or "COPYRIGHT". These source code archives can be obtained from the upstream project websites directly or later on from the MeeGo source code repository, which will be made available within a couple of weeks.

Finally

The MeeGo licensing policy on this page is the first and initial version. Changes are expected to take place both during the first months of project formation and over long term, resulting from a dialogue between project participants and from reactions to external developments. The Technical Steering Group of MeeGo is responsible for setting the licensing policy and is the author of this text. We welcome active dialogue about the policy in the project mailing lists and directly between participants.