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Re: how to automatically install all local packages


Corinna,

Thank you for raising these concerns. I am not sure if this issue is of interest to the entire cygwin-apps group, but I decided to include the group, as you did, in case others in the group were interested in information about our software dependencies.

Be sure that our intentions are to fully comply with the terms of the Cygwin licensing, and we believe that we are doing that.

Here is some information about our software:
* Over half of our project is written Java, not C++. All Java code is compiled using the Sun Java SDK.


* The C++ portions of our software are compiled using the MinGW Windows port of G++, installed from mingw.org as a separate product. It was a significant undertaking to port our socket and threading code from Unix to Windows APIs, but we did it specifically to avoid the need for cygwin.dll. To date, we have not used Cygwin's gcc for the compilation of any software we release. We should have no dependencies on the cygwin.dll, and have verified the lack of cygwin.dll dependencies in current and past releases. Typically, we do not install the Cygwin GCC to avoid any possibility for confusion with either our development team or our user base. (Avoiding the installation of Cygwin GCC is one of the reasons we like to distribute a subset of the Cygwin packages)

* Our software was has unique requirements for runtime compilation and linking. The main features of cygwin that we utilize are 'make', 'tar', and 'ssh'. Our software executes these commands as Java child processes; there are not any link-level dependencies.

I hope this information helps give you confidence that we are operating within the bounds of the license agreements. If you would like additional information, including output from tools such as cygcheck, I would be happy to provide it. Like I said, it is our intention to be fully compliant. Please let me know if you continue to see reason for concern.

Cygwin is truly a powerful environment, and one which has enabled us to port our software from the Unix domain to Windows. Cygwin has also enabled me to migrate by development environment from Unix to Windows without excessive loss of productivity. I thank you and the rest of the Cygwin developers for all of your work developing and maintaining it.

Sincerely,
Tod Courtney


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Tod,

On May 12 12:48, Tod Courtney wrote:

We use Cygwin to provide the Windows port of our academic software (www.mobius.uiuc.edu). Our software installation program prompts the user for various paths, including the location of our software, and the location of the cygwin folder.


I just visited your page and it looks like Moebius is proprietary software.
If you have linked Moebius to the Cygwin DLL, then you're infringing the
GPL license of Cygwin by not providing the source code of your application.
See http://cygwin.com/licensing.html for details.

How can you go from here?

If your software is not linked against the Cygwin DLL and you're just
providing Cygwin as an environment to run your application in, then you're
done.

If your software is open source and you're providing the source code to all
your users for free, then that's fine and you're done.

However, if you don't provide the sources to your users then that's
a breach of the Cygwin GPL license.  In this case you have two choices:

Your source code has to be GPLed and you must provide it to your users.

or

  You can purchase a buyout license from Red Hat.  To do this, please
  either contact Red Hat using the contact information given at the bottom
  of our web page http://cygwin.com/licensing.html, or contact my manager
  Eric Bachalo, which I have Cc'ed in this posting.


--
Tod Courtney                         Senior Research Programmer
Coordinated Science Lab                      | Ph:(217)244-3203
University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign  | Fx:(217)244-3359
231 CSL, 1308 W. Main St., Urbana, IL 61801  |tod@crhc.uiuc.edu



Thanks in advance, Corinna


-- Tod Courtney Senior Research Programmer Coordinated Science Lab | Ph:(217)244-3203 University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign | Fx:(217)244-3359 231 CSL, 1308 W. Main St., Urbana, IL 61801 |tod@crhc.uiuc.edu


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