Subject: Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97
From: [email-masked] (Jim Balter)

15 Feb 1997 01:47:12 -0800
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Original-To: Stan Shebs <[email-masked]>
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Stan Shebs wrote:

> It actually seems a little hypocritical for a proprietary software
> developer to complain that Cygnus is not handing them a bunch of code
> that they can just incorporate and make a big profit with the result,
> with no sort of contribution back to the free software community.

Since no one here has made this complaint, I don't know who you are
addressing.  What is hypocritical is to pretend that Cygnus is
somehow doing what they are doing in order to encourage companies
not to hoard software, rather than to make a buck off the fact that
companies *do* hoard software.  Paying Cygnus a license fee is not
a "contribution back to the free software community", as I see it.

> We're giving proprietary developers a simple choice; use the GPLed
> library and be willing to make your software free, or buy out of the
> GPL using the same sort of license that you have with your other
> library vendors.

That's fine, but a consequence of this strategy is that cygwin can no
longer be treated as an unencumbered contribution to the community, but
rather a source of profit to Cygnus.  People who may have seen
themselves as "contributors" really are "beta testers".  Cygnus has
every right to put it within that framework, but a consequence is a
change in the relationship with those contributors.  Note that the
original poster on this thread referred to a "community effort"; I was
the one who challenged that on Cygnus' behalf.  It *could* have been a
community effort, but that is no longer possible.  Rather than
understand this, you folks seem to defensively be seeing "condemnations"
around every corner.  When I point out that Cygnus has deviated from the
FSF/GNU free software concept, you seem to get offended, and spend lots
of energy explaining why it makes good business sense to deviate.  So we
are just agreeing.  Cygnus is there to make profit; that includes making
profit off the fact that companies hoard software.  The marketers see
the fact that companies hoard software as providing a market for a
piece of code that was developed with a different intent.  So when
Jeremy Allison says "This allows you to use Cygwin32 and not share your
source (boo, hiss)", he is at the very least leaving a false impression.
The folks he is booing and hissing are the people that are his
source of income.

--
<J Q B>
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