Subject: Re: cygwin.dll GPL distrib issues
From: [email-masked] (Michael Anderson)

27 Jun 1997 22:29:58 -0700
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Distribution: cygnus
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Original-To: Bryon Roche <[email-masked]>
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Bryon Roche wrote:
> 
> What are the ramifications of changing the cygwin.dll licence from the
> GPL to the LGPL? Wouldn't this solve the commercial gnu-win32 program
> distribution problem??
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I thinks that would take care of it. Since the dll is a library, I don't
understand why it was not LGPL to start with. It seems strange that
Cygnus asks all contributors to assign their copyright to Cygnus and
then restricts its "free" use with the GPL. I was unwilling to assign my
contribution (because I need commercial use of my work) and instead
placed it in the public domain. I noticed that another contributor did
the same. I guess if this happens frquently enough, it will sufficiently
cloud the copyright ownership and push cygwin towards "free" use,
including commercial use. The LGPL seems very reasonable - people who
want their code to be freely available achieve that and people with
proprietary code also acheive that.

Cygnus has announced a new licensing policy will be out in about a
month. Until I see the new policy, I've stopped working on enhancing the
cygwin code. I have to earn a living first, which is pretty difficult
already without spending  a lot of effort on another project that I
can't use.
-- 

Mike Anderson
[email-masked]
Guanajuato, GTO, Mexico
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