Hi FreeRDP developers, After long and careful reflexion regarding the license change of FreeRDP, I made my final decision: *FreeRDP 0.9 and later versions will be released under the Apache License 2.0* More details about the license can be found here: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html I have contacted some of you personally to get your input regarding the license change, and what I got was stronger support for Apache License 2.0 than for LGPL/GPL. Some of you do not necessarily agree with the license choice, but are still willing to comply and continue with us. If you go on the FreeRDP website, you will see that it still shows the original mission statement that was written when the project was started: *FreeRDP is a fork of the rdesktop project that intends to rapidly start moving forward and implement features that rdesktop lacks the most.* I still remember writing those lines in plain HTML to put on freerdp.sourceforge.net as a placeholder, before taking the time to build a better website. A lot has changed since then, a lot. I'll be honest with you: when I wrote those lines, I wasn't expecting that the project would grow and become what it is now. I was hoping that it would, but in no way I was *expecting* it to happen. Well, it happened, and I am truly excited about the way things go. I wish to thank all of you for making this a reality. If the original intent was mostly targeting rdesktop, the new intent aims at much higher goals on the long term. I wish to make FreeRDP a much larger project aiming at providing a de-facto standard implementation of RDP. One argument that came in the discussion was that for this to happen, it must be obvious that we provide the best implementation of RDP. Well, there aren't that many implementations around, and judging from the interest FreeRDP is currently getting we can certainly make this happen. This new long term goal for the project comes at a price. I do not believe we would be able to reach this goal using a reciprocal software license, or one that is often called viral. A free software license should help a project grow, not stand in its way. No, in order to become a de-facto standard implementation, we must move to permissive licensing that would make the software usable in the largest possible number of licensing scenarios. If we stick to LGPL/GPL, we will be restricting the possible licensing scenarios with permissive licenses, and we will also be imposing strong restrictions for proprietary licensing. How could we possibly aim at becoming a widely accepted de-facto standard implementation if we impose such restrictions? I understand the fear of having companies write their own code that they would not contribute back. From what I've heard, there are many GPL violations related to rdesktop. Yes, we could stay in GPL and try to pressure people not willing to comply into releasing the source code, but for which purpose? You need to think that this code is probably very unclean, hackish and specific to a certain context. We should be focusing on working with people that want to collaborate, not focusing on going after those who do not want to. Believe me, there are companies who would be willing to join their efforts into FreeRDP if we were to switch to a permissive license. After all, free software does fall pretty well within their business model: when you build a thin client, what matters the most is getting the cheaper product at the highest quality possible. If everybody gets better software to start with, they can focus on making the rest much better. It's a win-win situation. By the way, if I really feared getting my source code "stolen", I wouldn't have started this project. People are making money off my source code, and it is perfectly fine with me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money off open source software. I think there are sufficient companies with commercial interests in the software that would be willing to allocate resources that it is definitely the way to go. Of course, I wouldn't be telling you that if I didn't have something specific in mind. I've had a long talk with Jay the other day, and we brought back an idea which we had for a long time: we would like to create some sort of "FreeRDP Foundation" or at least a legal entity to represent the project. We have good contacts within the industry that we can go to and try to get involved with the project. We do not know the specifics of it yet, but that *will* happen if we switch to Apache License 2.0, I promise. Another possibility that was discussed between me and Jay would be to change the license of xrdp and merge it with the FreeRDP project. I don't think we should merge the sources, but FreeRDP would become a project consisting of a client and a server. I think that the FreeRDP long term growth is strongly linked with the availability of a good RDP server implementation. Now, since this is a license change, I cannot just go a relicense code from copyright holders that do not agree to the license change. After talking to most of you, I got the assurance that we were almost at consensus on the question. In fact, the only person I didn't ask personally was probably Otavio, because he's made his opinion very clear. I got a positive response from everybody I contacted personally. I do not want this to get personal: if you value more the license than the project itself, then it is your choice, not mine. If we really have to get to that, we will simply have to remove the copyrighted code that we cannot relicense and move on. It is a small harm on the short term, but it will benefit on the long term. Code contributions, even if useful, are simply not worth sacrificing the fate of the entire project, especially when I got support from most of you. Remember that me and Jay are the ones leading this project. I wouldn't be making this decision if I wasn't convinced that it was for the good of the project on the long term. If you choose to leave, please know that I will respect your choice and comply to copyright law by simply removing the copyrighted code that wasn't agreed to be relicensed. No hard feelings, it is just the way things are. However, I strongly advise not to do it, since we'd like to keep as much people into the adventure of FreeRDP, even if there are some disagreements. We can't please everybody, that's for sure. Anyway, let's get this over with as soon as possible so we can focus on making FreeRDP the best RDP implementation ever :) Thanks again everyone for making FreeRDP what it is today, it is truly appreciated. Best regards, - Marc-Andre