Note for (potential) contributors: When you contribute via Filie's official project page (currently the Filie Yahoo group, and the repository at http://witness.is-a-geek.org:8800) you are asked to assign copyright to M. Uli Kusterer (the original author of Filie), as recommended by the Free Software Foundation for legal reasons (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html).

Do *not* submit source code additions to the official project page (which includes the mailing list) or repository if you do not want to assign your copyright. Submitting via the official channels constitutes an implicit agreement between you and Uli to assign your copyright for the changes.

There are a few other reasons why Uli wants you to assign copyright to him:

1) UKDistributedView, UKFinderIconCell and a few other classes constitute Uli's main source of income right now. He has made them available dual-licensed under the GPL as a courtesy to the Filie project. By assigning your bug fixes' copyright to him, you do him a favor, as he can re-integrate the bug fixes into his commercial version. Uli has promised to re-release the changes to which people assign him the Copyright under the GPL, so you lose nothing, and give a little back to him.

If you find yourself making significant changes and think they merit a share in the profits, contact Uli *beforehand* to work something out. Though, considering how self-contained and single-purpose these classes are, any significant change would probably constitute a major rewrite. If you write your own version of a class, Uli has no interest in selling your work.

2) Some of the smaller utility code source files were originally released under a much more permissive BSD-style license. The re-release under the GPL is necessary to integrate them in this project due to the GPL's "viral nature". However, when you assign your copyright to changes to these files to Uli, he can re-release them under a BSD-style license as well, which means you don't just get the changes added by people who make their changes to the BSD version available, you're also giving back to them.