Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97

[Jeremy Allison <jra at cygnus dot com>]

Larry Hall <lhall@rfk.com> writes:

> does the fact that Gygnus intends to 
> provide a commercial license mean that this product will either (1) fracture 
> into two products (commercial and GPL freeware) that cannot share a code base
> or (2) degenerate eventually to a product in one category or the other?

These are not the only choices.

Cygnus owns all the rights to the code currently in Cygwin32, by
it being assigned to Cygnus by the original authors, or by being
written by Cygnus employees. There is no question of Cygnus
appropriating someone elses code. If a person produces a patch
to Cygwin32 and doesn't assign ownership to Cygnus then it won't
go into the source code repositary, it's that simple.

Because of the above fact it is completely possible for Cygnus to issue
the code under two separate licenses.

License (1) is the GPL. This is for authors producing work that
they share under the GPL (something I stongly encourage people
in the traditionally 'closed' world of DOS and Windows to consider).
Note that my original post was in error - this doesn't preclude
commercial use of the Cygwin32 library, so long as the terms of
the GPL are followed.

License (2) is a non-GPL use license. This allows you to use
Cygwin32 and not share your source (boo, hiss). This is available
for people who (for watever reason) don't want to put their source
code under the GPL. This probably includes commercial companies
and people who are used to commercial licenses for products. As this
means you can ignore the GPL, this license costs.

Note that even though there are two different licenses, the 
Cygwin32 library in both *IS THE SAME CODE*. There is no
divergance.

The only people who can complain about the situation are the
'Shareware' type authors who typically take freely available 
UNIX source code, port it to DOS/Windows and then hide the
source and charge people for the privilage (a certain vendor
of Windows NT telnetd springs to mind). Those people can pay
to use Cygwin32 if they really want. Forgive me if I'm not
terribly concerned about their problems with the GPL....

I know how far Cygwin32 is from POSIX. I also know how close we
can get with more engineering effort. I think the people who think
we won't get there will be suprised :-).

Jeremy Allison,
jra@cygnus.com


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