September 1998

With V0.80, the licence agreement of XFolder has changed.

While previous versions were "plain" freeware, the XFolder package is now placed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) Version 2.

Die GPL is a general licence agreement which was developed by the Free Software Foundation to protect the rights of programmers who wish to publish the source code of their software. The GPL is mostly used with software of the GNU project and has become more widely known with the evolution of Linux, which is mostly published under the GPL too.

You can find the full text of the GPL in the plain-text file COPYING in the XFolder installation directory. I have added a formatted version of this on the next page of this document.

By installing XFolder on your system, you declare your agreement to the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public Licence, Version 2, as contained in the file COPYING in the XFolder installation directory.

The GPL means more Legalese, but also more rights for you as a user and, if applicable, developer. The most obvious change is that XFolder's source code is now also released.

The following brief explanations are intended as an introduction to the terms and conditions of the GPL only. They are not part of the licence agreement, for which only the terms and conditions in the COPYING file shall prevail.

This licence does not necessarily cover future releases. Ulrich M”ller retains the right to modify the licence agreement for future versions.

I have chosen to publish the source code because XFolder has become a fairly complex application by now, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find bugs, because many of these simply do not show up with my system configuration, and I am not willing to buy new hardware to debug XFolder. I hope that now some users will be able to find bugs in the code themselves.

In addition, as I have stated several times, I think that the only chance for OS/2 to survive is that more free software is needed. By publishing the source code I hope that more developers will take the step to develop their own WPS classes, because WPS programming only seems to be completely wild in the beginning. After a while, it's really fun.

I chose the restrictive GPL in this respect because then other developers will also have to release their software as GPL freeware.

And now: have fun with XFolder!

(C) Copyright 1997-98 Ulrich M”ller.