Yorba Entrusts Shotwell and Geary © to Conservancy

[Karen Sandler]

URL:
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2016/may/10/yorba-assigns-copyrights/

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Yorba Assigns Shotwell and Geary Copyrights to Software Freedom 
Conservancy

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.