Re: [Texmacs-dev] Double licensing or exceptional clauses

[David Allouche]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2002 at 09:25:24AM +0200, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
>
> We might add an exception which permits the copyright holders
> of TeXmacs to distribute or sell binary versions of TeXmacs
> when this is necessary to build TeXmacs on a given platform.
> The end-user has the right to copy and/or redistribute
> these binaries freely or for a fee.

I am very unsure that such a clause is workable for TeXmacs.

The problème is that "copyright holders" is a very loosely defined
term, since it include all individuals who have contributed
intellectual property to texmacs. At the very least that every person
who has contributed some code.

For commercial software, that is not a problem, since the copyright
holder is always the business who employed the developpers, but for a
free software "copyright holder" is somewhat ill-defined.

Generally, that is not a problem, unless you give additional rights to
the copyright holders. Then you can think of the problem in two ways:
either that right is granted to every copyright holder indivdually,
then the software no longer qualifies as copyleft; or that right is
granted to all copyright holders collectively, then agreement of all
copyright holders is required each time to exercice this right,
actually making it inneffective.

But I am no lawyer...

Really, I think we should keep off Qt/win32. However I really would
not like to have to program a user interface on raw MFC; as it is
probably as bad as Xlib. Maybe then we would be able to use wxWindows
for the win32 port.

-- 

                             -- David --