Revised Cygwin32 licensing terms

[Anand Kumria]

On Tue, 8 Jul 1997, Gordon Irlam wrote:

> We have revised the licensing terms on Cygwin32.  Previously Cygwin32 was
> licensed under the GPL.  This restricted the use of Cygwin32 in proprietary
> software.  The new license allows Cygwin32 to be used in both free and
> proprietary software, except by direct competitors of Cygnus.

This sounds very similar to Microsoft license for its Visual C++
compilers. 

> Details of the new license are available from the GNU Win32 home page:
> 
>     http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32/

What is the name of this product? The subject line says CygWin32, and now
you are saying GNU Win32. Since are not licensing the code under a GNU
license, I think you should use CygWin32.

> We haven't yet built a new release, but when we do, we will be incorporating
> the new licensing terms into it.

Will you then be removing old copies of CygWin32 from your site? Will old
releases retrospectively fall under this new license? 

[snip]
> The new licensing terms for Cygwin32 permits anyone to make use of Cygwin32
> without adhering to the GPL, and without being required to make their
> sources available, provided that in so doing they are not attempting to
> directly compete with Cygnus.  The reason we decided it was necessary to
> prevent the use of Cygwin32 by companies that are competing directly with
> Cygnus is explained below.

Ahh, I see. You don't think you can survive commerically, and hope that by
licensing CygWin32/GnuWin32 under a differently, you might be able to.

> Cygnus specializes in the provision of development tools for embedded
> systems. Cygnus is responsible for perhaps 80% of all on going GCC
> development, and 95% of all GDB development.  We commercialize our
> development efforts through our GNUPro compiler tool chain.  Other people and
> organizations contribute to, and benefits from our work.

An aside: do you have the right to use the GNU name at all? There is a lot
of good will attached to the GNU label, and your efforts with the
CygWin32/GnuWin32 project has certainly reduced it. Newcomers to the "GNU
way" may not have realised that Cygnus is a commercial company, with
objectives different to the GNU Project itself.

> We have found that some of our embedded systems competitors have taken the
> work we have publically released and then are using it to compete directly
> with us.  These companies typically do not contribute back to the ongoing
> development of GCC.  Several examples follow.  Taos Systems uses GCC as the
> compiler for their embedded operating system, but are not involved in the
> ongoing maintenance of GCC, and haven't made any of the modifications they
> have made to GCC publicly available.  Wind River, a major embedded systems
> developer, with a market valuation of around $1100m, makes heavy uses of the
> GNU tools including GCC, and even has a proprietary graphical front end to
> GDB (that has been designed in such a way as to get around the GPL), but
> they currently don't contribute anything to the ongoing development of any
> of GCC and GDB tools.  Tao Mountain (unrelated to Taos Systems) did a port of
> GCC for IDT to the IDT MIPS R5000, but have never merged their sources back
> with the FSF.  We find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage relative to
> these companies because these companies manage to avoid the software
> development costs Cygnus has to pay.

If you (Cygnus) believe these companies have violated the license that
you, or the FSF, distribute these products under why are you not able to
take them to court? You have already stated that you do "80% of GCC
development, and 95% of GDB development", so surely you have a vested
interest in enforcing compliance with the license agreement. 

> We want to make Cygwin32 widely available, because we want to maximum number
> of people that have access to it, and are able to extend and modify it.  We
> believe that doing this will improve Cygwin32 both in terms of its quality
> and features, and you are encouraged to return any changes you make to
> Cygwin32 to Cygnus for inclusion in a future release.  On the other hand we
> feel our direct competitors in the embedded tools space should not be able
> to take Cygwin32, which we developed, and use it to compete directly with
> us.  We hope the new Cygwin32 licensing terms will meet our goals.

They certainly do seem to meet your goals, although they could also be
stated another way: "We intend to penalise everyone with a restrictive
license, because we are not able to take action over our competitors who
violate the license(s) of some products we assist in developing".

I hope you reconsider,
Anand.

--
 `When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to
  its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are
  forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how
  holy the motives' -- Robert A Heinlein, "If this goes on --"

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