Subject: Re: Availability of CYGWIN
From: [email-masked] (Anders Lindgren)

24 Jan 1997 16:23:30 -0800
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
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Hi!

Geoffery Noer <[email-masked]> wrote:
> We plan to always make it freely available under the terms of the GPL.

Have you ever considered to release the CygWin library under the GNU
_Library_ General Public License (The LGPL) while keeping all the
tools under the GPL? (*)

In my opinion, this is the logical choice since it would ensure the
CynWin system would be free, at the same time as anybody could be able
to use the development tools to produce real (even commercial)
programs.

As the situation is today, to people outside Cygnus, the CygWin tools
are only of interest when they have no ambition what-so-ever to write
a commercial program.  In other words, it's a cool _toy_.

In fact, in the UNIX environment, GCC (and all other GNU tools) are
covered by the GPL, while the standard C library (roughly corresponding
to cynwin.dll) is covered by the LGPL.

(*) The GNU Library GPL is similar to the normal GPL.  The only main
difference is that a library that is covered by the LGPL could be used
in any project (even commercial), if it is possible for the user up
upgrade the library.

	-- Anders
-- 
/------------------------------------------------------------------------\
|  Anders Lindgren     Computing Science Department, Uppsala University  |
|  [email-masked]                      http://www.csd.uu.se/~andersl  |
| "I [..] am rarely happier then when spending an entire day programming |
| my computer  to perform automatically  a task that it  would otherwise |
| take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.  Ten seconds, I tell myself, |
| is ten seconds.  Time is valuable and ten seconds' worth of it is well |
| worth the  investment of a day's  happy activity working  out a way to |
| save it".             -- Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See"           |
\------------------------------------------------------------------------/
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