I believe it is possible to move towards a stricter license without acceptance from"In addition, as a special exception, the LyX Team gives permission to
link the code of this program with any third party, closed source
library and distribute linked combinations including the two."
then I fail to see why we don't say that.
because not everybody agrees on this (andre in particular if i remember correctly), and the only way to test it is to go to court?
However, if we really do mean that 'special exception is given to link
against XForms' and as XForms is no longer closed source, then the
special exception is no longer needed and can be removed and lyx
reverts to a 'pure' GPL licence.
but i thought that license changes (like reverting to the GPL) need to be accepted by every contributor (which prevented us changing the license to the general version you suggest above in the first place)
everybody. If someone submits code without the xforms exception and it gets
into lyx, then you effectively have GPL-only lyx. The exception might still apply
to old code, but no longer to the whole of lyx, because the whole then include some
GPL-only code. Of course such a move won't be popular if someone actually is against it.
Helge Hafting
