Yorba Assigns Shotwell and Geary Copyrights to Software Freedom Conservancy

May 10, 2016

Software Freedom Conservancy announces that it has received an assignment of copyrights from the Yorba Foundation in order to safeguard those copyrights for the future. Yorba ceased operations in 2015 and is now completing the process of formally dissolving.

Yorba's assignment included copyrights in Shotwell, a free and open source image management tool, and Geary, a free and open source mail client. The assignment comes as part of Yorba's winding down process, which Yorba's leadership has used to ensure that the appropriate infrastructure exists for its former projects to continue in Yorba's absence. Yorba's founder, Adam Dingle, and former executive director, Jim Nelson, commented, We're a little sad to see Yorba end, but we're still proud of what we accomplished in the six years that Yorba was active. We're pleased to see that development of both Geary and Shotwell is continuing, even in Yorba's absence. We hope that both these programs will have long and healthy lives ahead of them in the GNOME world.

Both Shotwell and Geary have lead maintainers dedicated to continuing the work where Yorba has left off.

The Geary community very much appreciates the excellent work done by Yorba for so many years, said Michael Gratton, maintainer of Geary. With Yorba's copyrights safely in Conservancy, we can focus on continuing to make Geary a great Free Software email experience going forward.

My mission is to ensure that Shotwell stays the great photo manager for the Linux desktop that it is, added Jens Georg maintainer of Shotwell. I will do that by aiming to improve on its user experience in terms of stability, speed and looks while carefully selecting interesting new features such as an improved geolocation and tagging experience.

Conservancy has expertise in copyright stewardship which it has employed on behalf of the Debian project and for members of the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers. Conservancy is happy to help Yorba and its former projects with this transition, said Karen Sandler, Conservancy's Executive Director. We look forward to watching these communities grow and develop.

Yorba's assignment also included copyrights in Valencia, a freely-licensed plug-in for the gedit text editor, and gexiv2, a freely-licensed wrapper for the Exiv2 photo metadata library.