Subject: Re: Lack of Cygwin contributors? Was: How is textmode/binmode determined ...
From: "Kendall Bennett" <[email-masked]>
To: DJ Delorie <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 1 May 2000 18:59:04 -0800

DJ Delorie <[email-masked]> wrote:

> >  1. Chris was complaining about the lack of *external* contributions 
> > to the project. Whether you like it or not, the current licensing of 
> > Cygwin has a significant effect on whether some developers 
> > contribute. It certainly has for me.
> 
> I understand that.  I don't understand what you hope to gain by us
> not offering proprietary-use licenses. 

It is not what *I* hope to gain, but what *you* would hope to gain. 
If you want my contributions (and perhaps those of others who feel 
the same way), you would get them if the license was LGPL. Then I 
would be willing to contribute because my changes we would be as free 
to you as the next guy.

If you don't care about external contributions then so be it. But 
that was after all how this discussion started.

> >  2. If the licensing was changed, I believer more external developers 
> > would contribute to the project.
> 
> So, if the license were 100% GPL with no option for non-gpl use,
> you'd contribute? 

Yes I would, since then I could use it for GPL'ed tools on the Win32 
platform. The only real use I would personally have for Cygwin would 
be to run GNU tools under Win32. I personally don't have any need to 
port commercial Unix software to the Win32 platform.

> >  3. If Cygnus needs to sell expensive commercial licenses of Cygwin 
> > in order to continue development, then the Open Source principles 
> > have simply failed for this project. 
> 
> Fortunately, we're not as interested in "open source principles"
> as we are interested in the principles of *free software*.  All
> version of Cygwin are distributed under the terms of the GPL.  Some
> customers purchase the right to also use it in other ways, but no
> customer is bereft of the rights and freedoms the GPL grants them. 
> I don't think you fully understand the significance of this. 

There are two issues at work here. One is that the Cygwin library is 
under GPL and hence requires other software to be GPL (or Open Source 
as the new license allows). The second is that this library is also 
available under a commercial license from you guys. If I made any 
changes to Cygwin I would want my changes to remain under GPL only, 
so I would not assign my copyright to Cygnus. Then my changes would 
not get into the Cygwin core distribution, and I would have to fork 
my own version. For all that it really isn't worth the effort I would 
have to put in, so I don't contribute.

> What you seem to want is the ability, or "right", to use our free
> software in your proprietary product, so that you can make more
> money, without us making more money too.  Sorry, that's not one of
> the principles we're interested in. 

Nope. I don't have any proprietry product that I am building that 
would use or be based on Cygwin.

I just don't feel it is right for a product to be branded as 'free 
software' when it is dual licensed with an exclusive commercial 
license also. At least I am not interested in contributing to making 
it better.

> Every Cygnus employee (and every RH employee, I think) signs a
> form that assigns *all* copyright to the FSF for any FSF-owned
> software we work on.  The FSF could, if they wanted (but they
> won't), sell a proprietary-use license for GCC.  Would that stop
> you from contributing to gcc?  It doesn't stop us. 

The FSF is against doing exactly that. If the FSF did one day turn 
around and start selling proprietry-use licenses for FSF projects, 
you can get that the entire Open Source community would be up in arms 
about it. So why should Cygnus be allowed to behave any differently?

Regards,

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