Subject: Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97
From: [email-masked] (Bill Mann/US/Praxis)

12 Feb 1997 13:48:02 -0800
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Distribution: cygnus
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Original-To: Shankar Unni <[email-masked]>
Original-Cc: Jeremy Allison <[email-masked]>, garp <[email-masked]>,
        sos <[email-masked]>, gnu-win32 <[email-masked]>,
        jra <[email-masked]>, noer <[email-masked]>
Original-Sender: [email-masked]

Shankar, in the sea of noise concerning the Cygwin32 Press Release, it's 
refreshing to find someone who understands the issues, and with whom I can 
wholeheartedly agree.

In my mind, this announcement reduces the Cygwin project from a great hope for 
a standard UNIX-like environment for NT, to 'just' another commercial porting 
kit, plus a problematic port of the FSF tool suite.

Looking just at the tool suite port, the lack of full support for the native MS 
file naming conventions is a serious problem.  For the Cygwin file naming 
approach to be acceptable at a particular site, it would have to be adopted for 
all commonly-used programs, so that the MS file naming conventions could be 
ignored.  That requires linking non-FSF programs with the Cygnus ddl.  

As long as linking arbitrary programs with cygwin32.ddl requires a special 
license from Cygnus, it will not become popular (at any price, due to the 
paperwork).  With no hope of wide-spread popularity, even early-adopters who 
are willing to pay will be forced to consider whether taking the Cygwin 
approach will make selling their products significantly more difficult.

To: jra @ cygnus.com (Jeremy Allison) @ SMTP
cc: garp @ opustel.com @ SMTP, sos @ prospect.com.ru @ SMTP, gnu-win32 @ 
cygnus.com @ SMTP, jra @ cygnus.com @ SMTP, noer @ cygnus.com @ SMTP (bcc: Bill 
Mann/US/Praxis)
From: shankar @ chromatic.com (Shankar Unni) @ SMTP
Date: 02/11/97 09:44:41 AM
Subject: Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97

Jeremy Allison said:

> (1). Buy a license from Cygnus for Cygwin32 so that
> you can ship the Cygwin32 code not under the GPL.
> 
> or :
> 
> (2). Your software comes under the terms of the GPL.

Hmm. This gives me a *really* bad feeling.. 

If you had put things under the *L*GPL, that's an entirely different matter.
Some of us are not at liberty to release sources, because they are not
ours to release. 

And if we have to *buy* Cygwin32 just in order to  be able
to fulfil our source licensing agreements, we are left with the choice of
paying for Cygwin32 or paying for *&@#$soft VC++. We already have a site
license for the latter, so the answer for us becomes sort of obvious..

GNU has always been a dicey issue with company lawyers who are afraid of
potential lawsuits (however unjustified), so they'll come down hard on any
attempt to use GNU unless there's a compelling economic and technical
advantage to using it over *@#&$soft.  Which there isn't any more, under
the above terms..

If this is under *L*GPL, the answer is quite different, since the tradeoffs
are somewhat more palatable. My feeling is that changing your terms to putting
cygwin32 under the LGPL would bring you many more commercial customers, and
you will benefit from this arrangement, too (I'm sure we'd have to make many
fixes to cygwin32 on our own, and we would naturally be releasing them back
to the community at large).

Please reconsider your licensing plans - you could be writing a poison pill
into your product with these terms..

-- 
Shankar Unni                                  [email-masked]
Chromatic Research                            (408) 752-9488
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