Exponential Copyright #

Exponential Copyright © 1998-2026 Exponential Foundation and 7x

This file is part of Exponential.

Copyright notice #

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

Original developer #

Exponential was originally developed by eZ Systems AS as eZ Publish, a product that was discontinued:

Copyright (C) 1999 - 2014 eZ Systems AS. All rights reserved.

This notice stays in LICENSE, here and in every source file that contains their code, as the license requires.

The holders #

The copyright of Exponential is held by the Exponential Foundation and 7x together.

• The Exponential Foundation (https://foundation.exponential.earth) is the nonprofit that operates the project for its users and community. It is named first on purpose: it is the steward meant to carry the software's rights, its license and its history through the whole support window of a release line, independent of any one company.
• 7x (https://se7enx.com), known as Brookins Consulting before 2022, is the company that leads the development, maintains the code, reviews and merges the contributions and supports the customers. It is a full holder.

History of the notice: the shift of 29 October 2026 #

On 29 October 2026 the copyright of Exponential moved from 7x alone to the Exponential Foundation and 7x together, and every notice of the project was replaced by one notice in two forms:

Before that date the project's own notice was written in several ways, among them "7x and others", "7x / Exponential Foundation", "7x & Exponential Foundation", "7x and the Exponential Foundation" and "7x" alone. On 2 October 2026 the project's line had been put above the eZ Systems AS line in some 3,000 files; the change of 29 October 2026 made all of them one notice, with the Foundation first, in about 3,800 files. The notice is never translated. The text of the license did not change.

The full story, the reasons and the rules for new files and extensions are in the documentation: Copyright and copyleft (German).

Contributors #

Exponential is written by many contributors, recorded in the git history and on the about page of every installation (/ezinfo/about). Code contributions to this repository are accepted under the Contributor Licensing Agreement, which assigns their copyright to the Exponential Foundation and 7x together (see CONTRIBUTING.md); documentation contributions under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later (doc/eng-us/README-LICENSE.md).

Third-party notices #

The copyright notices of other authors and of the third-party software included with Exponential are kept unchanged in their files: among them eZ Systems AS, Mugo Web (code derived from LoveStack), CJW Network, Moxiecode Systems AB and Tiny Technologies (TinyMCE), the OpenJS Foundation (jQuery), Unicode, Inc. (CLDR data), Nokia and Trolltech (Qt Linguist sources of the translation updater), the KDE Artists (Crystal icons) and the Tango icon library. The list of exceptions that name 7x or the Foundation in another form, each with its reason, is tests/tests/bin/copyright-notice-allowlist.json.

Copyright License Terms #

Exponential is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Exponential is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Exponential in LICENSE. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.