Re: Computer magazine CHIP asks for permission to distribute "cygwin" on its cover-cd

[Corinna Vinschen <vinschen at redhat dot com>]

Hi,


In case you missed it, you're writing to a public mailing list.


On May  4 12:40, Dulic Kresimir wrote:
> Dear Sir or Madam,
> 
> my name is Kresimir Dulic, I work for the German edition of CHIP Magazine (Sold circulation: over 364,000 copies per month; Readership: over 1.63 million readers per issue). 
> 
> Currently we are writing an article about freeware and in this context your really interesting software got our special attention. 
> As a service to our readers, we monthly provide a CD/DVD on every issue of our magazines. 
> Therefore we'd like to publish your software "cygwin" in the future on the cover discs of our publications.

The entire Cygwin distribution is 5 Gigs.  How are you going to put this
on a DVD?  Are you creating a package selection only?

The setup tool does not automatically provide a method to install from
DVD.  It's supposed to install the Cygwin distribution from some of the
mirrors on the net.  So the alternative is to provide the setup tool
only (*with* source code) and then let the user install from the net as
usual.  But that's not very useful for a DVD.

Do you provide support if your users have installation problems?  Or do
you point the users to this mailing list?  The latter would not be very
nice, given that we don't know anything about your DVD and how much
customization you've done to make Cygwin's setup doing a DVD install.

> DISTRIBUTION GRANTING
> 
> 1. The Contracting Party herewith grants CHIP Communications GmbH (hereinafter "CHIP Communications GmbH") the right to reproduce the software program
>  cygwin (hereinafter "Software") on CD Roms and/or DVDs of publications of CHIP Communications GmbH
> as well as to publish, distribute and use it in this context for advertising purposes.
> 2. The Contracting Party may withdraw this granting for all titles of CHIP Communications GmbH within two issues notice.
> 3. The Software stated in Item 1 is	
> 	[  ] Freeware
> 	[  ] Shareware with a running time of ___ days and
> 	[  ] complete functional range
> 	[  ] reduced functional range
> 	[  ] a trial version.

The Cygwin DLL and all the hundreds of packages are NOT freeware, NOT
shareware, and NOT trial versions.  They are Open Source software, each
one with potentially a different OSS licenses from
http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd/

As a matter of fact, the majority of the packages require you to provide
the source codes of the software as well, preferredly on the same or an
equivalent medium on which you distribute the binaries.  

Your "DISTRIBUTION GRANTING" text give me some doubts that you
understand the licensing and the implications of providing Open Source
software, or that it is your intent to provide Open Source software at
all.  Since the project is a collaborative effort, I also don't see how
anyone could fill out this DISTRIBUTION GRANTING snippet for anybody
else in the project.  Especially given that it doesn't fit well with
Open Source licenses.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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