is it ok to ship cygwin.dll with an application covered by BSD?

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Jun 15 11:00, Britton Kerin wrote:
> case.  We have tried hard to get the system going using mingwin and the
> cygwin.a library, which we understand is ok to use, but it doesn't quite 
> work, some important libraries fail to build.  With cygwin.dll, 
> everything is beautiful.  

That was to be expected.  libcygwin.a is just a link library for
cygwin1.dll.  However, even if that would have worked, it wouldn't have
changed anything related to the licensing terms.  Linking against Cygwin
in any way applies GPL rules.

> I'm not clear if we are allowed to ship the application with cygwin.dll
> though.  We could include source code for cygwin.dll, or source code
> pointers, or whatever.  I am hoping that since cygwin.dll is freely
> available, we can ship it with our processor?

You can.  Look under http://cygwin.com/licensing.html, especially the 
"*** NOTE ***" section.

Always keep in mind, that you have to provide sources for the Cygwin DLL,
if you distribute the Cygwin DLL itself.  Actually we would prefer that
you refrain from distributing Cygwin at all and instead point the users
to the Cygwin web site where they can use setup.exe to download the
parts of the Cygwin distribution as they see fit.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Co-Project Leader          mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.

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