Cygwin licencing

Chris Faylor cgf@cygnus.com
Tue Aug 31 23:49:00 GMT 1999


On Wed, Aug 25, 1999 at 06:32:27AM -0700, Chris Telting wrote:
>I was reading an old thread in the archive and I'm a bit confused now about
>the cygwin unix library licencing.  I thought it was freely usable.  But
>then I read this in the faq:
>
><QUOTE>
>In particular, if you intend to port a commercial (non-GPL'd) application
>using Cygwin, you will need the  commercial license to Cygwin that comes
>with the supported native Win32 GNUPro product. The commercial license for
>the Cygwin library is included in a GNUPro Toolkit subsciption. Pricing for
>GNUPro Subscription starts at $6000 for three developers and includes GNUPro
>Toolkit, Developer Support, and a commercial-use license for 100 copies of
>the cygwin library.
></QUOTE>
>
>I understand the library is GPL'd and not LGPL'd but if it's GPL how can
>they can cygnus can be commercial licencers if there is code from other
>contributers?  The library is a dll and as such it's dynamicly linked.  Can
>anyone clarify this?

We own 100% of the source code for the cygwin DLL.  That means that we
can relicense it as we please.

Net releases are licensed under the GPL.  Our commercial customers get
a different license and are able to release the cygwin DLL without source
code.

If you have further questions about cygwin licensing, send mail to
info@cygnus.com.

Now, as Earnie suggested, it's best that this be discussed somewhere else
besides this mailing list.

-chris

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