Our official policy on free and open-source (F/OSS) plug-ins distributed with Unify is as follows:
- We publicly acknowledge and thank all contributors, and we want everyone to know that their work is not ours.
- We provide information and links to each project, and encourage our users to:
- learn about the project,
- “upgrade” to the “official” version of each plug-in, and
- donate money to the developers, if they are willing/able.
- We will make a point of donating money to each project, as and when we are able.
- For open-source works, we will, whenever practical
- maintain our own fork of the project
- take steps to ensure that the source code is up-to-date and can be built with current development tools
- develop our own improvements, and
- contribute these back to the root project.
- For open-source works released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), we affirm that our right to use, distribute, and optionally extend/enhance the published source code is guaranteed by the terms of the GPL itself, provided we abide by the rules of the GPL.
- For non-GPL works, we will abide by the terms of whatever license the original authors have chosen.
- We attempt to contact the authors and/or contributors of each F/OSS plug-in, to secure their permission to distribute copies of their work with Unify, and should they formally refuse, we will refrain from doing so.
- While we acknowledge the value each F/OSS plug-in adds to the Unify package as a whole, we assert that each stands as a representative of others of its class, and the value of the Unify product is not dependent upon any one specifically. Moreover, we assert, based upon this essential principle of substitutability, that Unify cannot, and should not, be considered a derivative of any of these individual works.