Mail Archives: cygwin/2012/02/08/00:59:12
On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 05:14:59PM -0600, Jesse Ziser wrote:
>On 2/7/2012 4:14 PM, carolus wrote:
>> On 2/7/2012 3:12 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>
>>> There's the usual misconception about the GPL. If you create an
>>> application which is linked against the Cygwin DLL (or any other GPLed
>>> library), but you only use the application in-house, there's no reason
>>> at all to distribute the source code to your collegues. If one of them
>>> really wants it, he can always ask you, right? Only if you provide the
>>> binaries to customers or to the world in some way, you are supposed to
>>> provide the sources codes as well in a GPL-compatible way.
>>>
>>
>> In a publication I have offered to furnish on request the source code
>> and windows executable for a program that I personally run under cygwin.
>> Don't I have to use mingw for the publicly distributed version, or else
>> bundle the executable with cygwin source code? As I understand, simply
>> providing a link to the cygwin web site does not satisfy the license.
>
>Well, if you don't want them to have to install Cygwin, then that's a
>bigger issue than just licensing. Think of Cygwin like an OS. If you
>want to create something that can run under Windows, not Cygwin, then
>you have to build it for Windows, not Cygwin. I don't know that it is
>even possible to simply "bundle" Cygwin with your application. Cygwin
>isn't just some little collection of libraries or something. It's a
>whole system that must be correctly installed on someone's computer.
Actually, you can easily bundle a program with the Cygwin DLL and have
it work fine. You don't need to install the whole system. That doesn't
mean it's a good idea, however, since your soon-to-be-out-of-date DLL
could cause confusion with an existing Cygwin application.
>If you really want Mingw (a free compiler and development environment
>for Windows), maybe what you should do is just download and install
>Mingw, and use that, instead of doing it through the Cygwin compiler
>using a barely-supported option. (Then you should get help with any
>problems you have over at Mingw's website instead of here.)
The MinGW cross-compiles are not "barely supported". They are included
in the distribution precisely so that people can build pure-windows
programs under Cygwin.
cgf
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