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Date:	Sat, 13 Mar 2004 22:28:40 -0500
From:	Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please AT cygwin DOT com>
To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	Re: cygwin distribution question.
Message-ID:	<20040314032840.GA4305@redhat.com>
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On Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 04:23:02AM +0100, jnuyens AT linuxbe DOT com wrote:
>A customer of ours wants to re-distribute cygwin.dll and a lot of
>utilities along with his proprietary software tools.  No linking occurs
>out of the source code to the provided applications.  However, the
>proprietary application modifies the configuration files of bundled
>services and restarts them and uses scripts to interface with these
>services.
>
>Does this mean the customer needs to buy the non-GPL license for the
>Cygwin.dll or move to MinGW?  We assume that this is not necessary
>because no modification of GPLed source code takes place, but our
>customer is a little bit nervous about the interpretation of 'derived
>works'.  Can you confirm our assumption?

It's really simple.  The customer needs to include sources for any
binaries distributed which use the cygwin DLL.

If they are distributing bash, they need to distribute the sources
for bash.

If they are distributing 'tar.exe', they need to distribute the sources
for tar.exe.

Also, perhaps more importantly, if they are distributing cygwin1.dll,
then they need to include all of the sources needed to build
cygwin1.dll.

If their software tools load cygwin1.dll then they need to distribute
the sources for their software tools.

You haven't provided enough details about what they are modifying to
really offer much advice beyond this but the bottom line is that if they
are "nervous" they should be consulting a lawyer not asking for unknown
strangers on a mailing list to offer assurance.  Red Hat does take it's
cygwin license and the GPL seriously.
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