weiss wondered,
> We should *really* go through the CREDITS file, contact all therein,
> and get them to consent to giving the LyX Team official permission to
> make changes to copyright as wee deem necessary, as long as such
> changes are not for commercial gain. Rich, could you ponder a
> paragraph stating something like that? We could then also put
> soemthing on the web page/in the source distribution asking long-lost
> contributors to get in touch with us.
i'd be happy to. However, that trusty funny feeling in the gut is
suggesting that while deliberating the contents and phrasing, this
should be done either by direct email or on a list that isn't
world readable and archived. Not so that we can do any funny
stuff, but so that mid-deliberation stuff doesn't get taken
out of context. I don't see any way that the comments could be
of later value (we can keep an archive and make extracts to show the
reasoning), but they could create a later mess. Or fuel unnecessary
flame wars.
> Really, this is an annoying loose end that will only grow worse. In
> practice, anyone who contributes a patch to LyX has "veto power" on
> license, copyright, and other changes only so long as they're
> semi-active members of the develpment team. It is assumed that anyone
> who abandons their corner of the code "bequeaths" it to the team. In
> principle, certain GPL-fundamentalist nutcases who shall remain
> nameless [Debian] go stomping around claiming we put LyX under a
> license that makes it illegal for anyone to ever run LyX and other
> such horseshit. To shut them up, I'd like to stuff a sock down their
> throats. However, others on the team would prefer not to resort to
> violence. ;) Performing the admittedly long and tedious task is our
> only alternative.
Agreed. I figure that what we'd want in permissions is,
a) ability to switch to any license that requires keeping the source
itself free (or should bsdish be ok? Look what netbsd got back from
apple).
b) the core developers should be able to issue exceptions--who knows
what licenses with odd compatibility problems will pop up in the
future.
c) the artistic license looked good, but i only gave it a once-thru.
d) there's also my off-the-cuff "raptor" license from a couple of
months ago.
> We need to do it at some point. Why not now, during the shakedown/bug
> reporting period of 1.0?
--
