Subject: Re: Things you can do with Cygwin
From: "Kendall Bennett" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 12:33:59 -0800

DJ Delorie <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > Actually, I think it's even a bit less restrictive than that.  I
> > believe that you can sell an application that depends on CygWin,
> > even as a closed-source proprietary program.
> 
> No, this is just plain wrong.  When you build an application with
> cygwin, part of cygwin itself is statically linked into the
> application.  The application is GPL at that point.

You know you can easily work around this particular problem too, 
since you can compile the stuff that uses Cygwin into a DLL and put 
that under an Open Source license. Then your app links against the 
DLL and not directly to any Cygwin code. Even if your DLL itself is 
GPL'ed, this is not a violation of the license. Lots of people will 
say that static linking and dynamic linking of GPL code is the same, 
but you I doubt you would never win that fight in court because there 
are too many pre-existing examples of this. 

Then again if you wanted to be more legal, stick the Cygwin stuff 
into a server program and talk to it only via RPC or sockets instead 
of direct dynamic linking. One could argue that this would also 
violate the GPL, but then if that was the case you would never be 
able to run proprietry programs under Linux because GNOME is GPL as 
is the Linux kernel.

Regards,

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