The license of this documentation #

Copyright and permission notice #

Copyright (C) 1998 - 2026 Exponential Foundation and 7x. All rights reserved.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

GNU Free Documentation License #

The license is the file LICENSE-GFDL-1.3.txt in this directory: the text of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008, exactly as the Free Software Foundation publishes it at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.txt. It is also on the web at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html. Version 1.3 is the latest version of the license.

The help in the administration (Help, the "?" button) shows the license on every page it opens, and links to Free documentation: use it to help yourself and others, which explains in plain words what the license lets you do.

What the notice covers #

The notice covers the documentation the Exponential project wrote and maintains in the doc/ directory of the repository: the help pages (doc/eng-us/help/), the guides, the installation chapters, the feature, upgrade and specification documents of the 6.x line (doc/eng-us/features/6.0/, doc/eng-us/bc/6.0/, doc/eng-us/specifications/6.0/), the changelogs of 6.x and of the extensions, the history, and the other pages at the top of doc/. This includes every 6.x page contributed through pull requests, whose copyright the contributors assigned to the Exponential Foundation and 7x.

There is no separate copyright of "the Exponential contributors": every contributor assigns the copyright in a contribution to the Exponential Foundation and 7x through the Contributor Licensing Agreement, so the notice names only those two. Contributors are credited (changelogs, commit authorship, the recognition pages), and credit is not a copyright claim; see Copyright and copyleft.

The software itself is not documentation: its source code stays under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version (LICENSE and COPYRIGHT.md in the repository).

Older pages with their own terms #

Some files in doc/ were inherited from the documentation of the original software, written by eZ Systems AS and its contributors between 1999 and 2014, and kept here for reference. The Exponential project does not hold their copyright and does not relicense them. They remain distributed under the terms they came with, the license of the repository (the GNU General Public License, version 2), and the copyright notice of eZ Systems AS applies to them. The help shows a different notice on these pages. They are:

• the feature, upgrade, specification and changelog documents of the versions before 6.0 (doc/eng-us/features/2.x to doc/eng-us/features/5.x, doc/eng-us/bc/4.x and doc/eng-us/bc/5.x, doc/eng-us/specifications/3.x, doc/eng-us/specifications/4.x and doc/eng-us/specifications/trunk, doc/changelogs/2.9 to doc/changelogs/5.x, and doc/changelogs/README.md);
• doc/eng-us/shop/, doc/eng-us/release-overview and doc/eng-us/standards/header.txt.

The example configuration files doc/eng-us/examples/htaccess and doc/eng-us/examples/ezpublish.conf were rewritten for Exponential 6 and are free documentation like the rest; the rewrite rules in them are those of .htaccess_root, part of the software and under its license.

doc/eng-us/branch-overview.md is new documentation under the GNU Free Documentation License, except its section "Historical branches (original SVN, 3.x)", which keeps the branch records of the original SVN repository under the terms they came with and says so in the page.

The list is the setting [License] OtherLicensePathRules[] in settings/exphelp.ini, which the help reads to choose the notice of a page.

Contributing to the documentation #

A change to a page under the notice above is accepted under the same license, the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or any later version, so that everyone keeps the same freedoms with the changed page. A contribution that cannot be published under these terms (text copied from a source with a different license, for example) has to say so in its pull request.

Copyright and copyleft #

Since 29 October 2026 the copyright of Exponential is held by the Exponential Foundation and 7x together, the Foundation named first: "Exponential Copyright © 1998-2026 Exponential Foundation and 7x", in files "Copyright (C) 1998 - 2026 Exponential Foundation and 7x. All rights reserved." Who holds it and why, what the GPL lets you do, the third-party notices that stay and how to write the notice in new files and extensions: Copyright and copyleft.

The libraries' license #

This documentation (GNU FDL 1.3 or later) and the kernel (GNU GPL version 2 or later) are not the only licenses in an installation. The kernel's libraries, the expcomponents (se7enxweb/expcomponents-*, since 6.0.15 Exponential's fork of the Zeta Components, which began as eZ Components), are licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and keep their own license files and notices in vendor/. Pages of this documentation that quote or describe those libraries do not change their license. What the fork is, and how Apache 2.0 and the kernel's "GPL version 2 or later" fit together: Exponential Components; what a bundle must list: Third-party components and their licenses.