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

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> Strictly speaking, the GPL needs no broadening since on any
> half-decent system the toolkit is part of the system libraries. In
> win32 we *can* use the MFC with GPL licensed code, and thus have
> complete access to the standard GUI toolkit.
> 
> The fact that we do not want to use the MFC because it sucks so much
> is another problem, but I do not think it is enough a reason to change
> license, especially since there may be libraries which provide the
> features we need, are less painful to use than the MFC, and are free
> as in speech.

We want to use a techically good cross-platform toolkit in order
for maximal development speed. MFC is not a cross-platform toolkit.

> I think I begin to understand what you want to do... LGPL is nice
> because it would allow anyone to link with non-free software (albeit
> only through dynamic linking), so it would not require us to set any
> exception, but it is bad because I may cause "evil" proprietary
> software developpers to make improvement to TeXmacs without releasing
> them back to the public (and to us).
> 
> So you would like to restrict this ability only to the copyright
> holders of TeXmacs. Essentially, TeXmacs would be released to the
> public as GPL'd code, but a single entity would have the right to use
> it as LGPL'd code. Right?

Something like that, yes.