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woody14619's Avatar
Posts: 1,455 | Thanked: 3,309 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY
#24
For those still confused about "if Nokia owned the Maemo site", I offer this:

MidGard1, on which the heart of maemo.org runs, uses the LGPL (likely v2.1). That license clearly states companies and individuals may use the software in commercial products AND modify it, AND copyright, AND declare ownership of, AND sell or re-distribute the re-bundled product.

Henri Bergius, co-author of MidGard and full owner of Nemein, made this change on the wikipedia page himself in November 2003, clearly stating this to be the case. He likely did so in order to be able to sell the products of his new company, which offered CMS services based on MidGard1 to various providers, including Nokia.

Anyone claiming that all of Maemo and/or the m.o site are FOSS and "100% open source" is legally incorrect. But please, don't take my word on that! Read the page on LGPL, and follow the reference links to the FSF page itself and read the legal document.

It boils down to this: Who will you believe when deciding if Nokia owned this material and had legal rights to assign it to HiFo? You have two choices: Someone named "Joerg_rw" on the internet, who refuses to say anything but "it's all free!" Or the creator of the software, the company that sold the CMS system/service to Nokia, the legal team at Nokia, and a generation of lawyers from the FSF who wrote and maintain the LGPL.
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