Subject: Re: Cygnus Win32 and GNU Win32
From: [email-masked] (Geoffrey Noer)

29 Oct 1998 18:56:31 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]>
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To: Andy Tai <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]

Andy Tai wrote:
> 
> Seeing the change of name from GNU-Win32 to CygWin32, I am just curious
> what is the general consideration of the leadership at Cygnus.   Is
> gradually GNU software drafted away from the FSF?   Is Cygnus
> gradually becoming indepenet of the GNU ideas?   

Although I don't speak for Cygnus officially, I'll try to answer this
as well as I can...

Cygnus started out selling support and contract services for the GNU
compiler tools (gcc, gdb, et al) as the core technology of its
business (back in 1989).  Today, Cygnus engineers make the majority of
changes to the development tools and essentially all of those changes
are integrated into future FSF releases.

That said, Cygnus is not the FSF and never will be.  As you point out,
Cygnus is a for-profit corporation for one thing.  But that doesn't
preclude being strongly committed to open source software, including
the GNU tools.  Recently, Cygnus announced eCos, the Embedded Cygnus
Operating System, an open-source, royalty-free, Commercial-grade RTOS
for embedded systems.  While eCos isn't GNU, it is still open source
and will be freely available.  Our new sourceware initiative (see

	 http://sourceware.cygnus.com/

for more information) consolidates in one place a number of open
source packages Cygnus is involved with, including eCos and Cygwin.

With respect to Cygwin, the Cygwin tools have always been open source
and will continue to be.  But the Cygwin library has never been a GNU
library.  For that matter, not all of the software included in the
distributions is GNU software.  So calling the project "GNU-Win32" was
a bit of a misnomer.  In addition, we think that calling the tools the
"Cygwin tools" that use the "Cygwin library" will be less confusing to
people.

> Regarding Cygwin32, contributions to the project must
> copyright-assigned to Cygnus.

Correct.  Cygwin library changes do indeed have to be
copyright-assigned to Cygnus.

> While assigning copyright to the FSF is understandable
> in its purpose, I wonder what is the goal of assigning rights to
> Cygnus?  After all, Cygnus is a for-profit corporation, unlike the
> FSF which has clearly understandable goals and purposes.   If I
> contribute to Cygwin32, can I assign my copyright to the FSF,
> instead of Cygnus?

As in the case of the FSF for its GNU software packages, Cygnus
wants a single entity to own Cygwin.  The assignment forms and
employer disclaimers help ensure that Cygnus won't be sued by a Net
contributor's employer for incorporating their code changes in Cygwin
or some such thing.  In addition, Cygnus made the decision to keep the
library under the GPL which effectively prevents legal use of the
Cygwin library in non-GPL'd commercial packages.  For those companies
who want to use it in a proprietary package, Cygnus sells a commercial
license for this purpose.  (And that's part of where my group's
salaries come from).  For that reason, an assignment to the FSF
wouldn't work.

I would like to reassure potential contributors that their changes
are guaranteed to always remain free software.  For one thing, Cygnus
is committed to keeping Cygwin an open source package.  Although I
think Cygnus' track record with respect to staying committed to open
source software is pretty good, you don't have to agree.  Imagine that
at some point Cygnus (stupidly) decides to make Cygwin completely
proprietary and stop involving the Net in its development.  Cygnus
would not legally be able to take back existing releases -- in fact,
as soon as a development snapshot is put out, that particular release
is permanently under the GPL.

So the Net could always choose to diverge from Cygnus if that was
warranted.  Obviously, Cygwin library divergence is something we
really hope will stay in the realm of the potential.  I sincerely hope
that those of us involved in Cygwin development at Cygnus will be able
to successfully lead the project forward and make Cygwin continue to
flourish as time goes on.  The key to that is maintaining a good
relationship with the Net community.

Starting with a B20 release in time for Halloween (which I hope won't
scare people too much), you should soon see some additional positive
developments with the project, including regular binary updates to the
Cygwin DLL available on the project ftp server.  We are also planning
to make the latest development sources available via anonymous CVS
from sourceware.cygnus.com so that Net developers will always have
access to the very latest version of Cygwin.  (If there is still a
demand for regular snapshots in addition, we may continue to do that
as well).  Finally, in order to speed up this list and make it easier
to maintain, we are looking into moving this mailing list to the new
sourceware server and changing mailers/mailing list software (at which
point we may well change its name to [email-masked]).  I'll
announce all of this as it happens...

OK, 'nuff said I think.  Time to get back to work on B20...

Best regards,

Geoffrey Noer
[email-masked]
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