how to automatically install all local packages

[Tod Courtney]

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