Subject: Re: cygwin and XEphem
From: Christopher Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 10:48:02 -0500

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 11:12:45PM -0600, Elwood C. Downey wrote:
>Hello Chris,
>
>I am still interested in using Cygwin to build the Windows edition of my 
>Astro program, XEphem. When I last approached Cygnus three years ago 
>they said this would cost me a one-time buy-out fee of $100,000 because 
>XEphem is not GPL.

Then don't use Cygwin or open up your application.  Seems like a pretty
clear choice to me.

>Nuts to that.  But now I see that the Red Hat language is not so
>strict.  All it says now is:
>
>"The GPL requires the source to any application built with the Cygwin
>libraries must be distributed with the application."

What "Red Hat language" would that be?  We don't control the GPL.  We
haven't changed the GPL.  Whereever you found this one sentence it
sounds like it is part of a larger whole.  It's not a definitive
licensing statement.

>Now this I can live with. I have always made the source to XEphem 
>available for download at no charge. Does this mean I can finally use 
>Cygwin without buying the outlandish buy-out license??

I am not a lawyer and am really not interested in doing a free analysis
of your license compliance.  However, if, as another message in this
thread seems to indicate, you restrict the distribution of your source
code when people purchase your product, you are not compliant with the
GPL.

I have Bcc'ed the person responsible for selling commercial versions
of Cygwin.  I assume that she will contact you if she judges from this
message that you are actually interested in buying something.  I hope
that you will be able to come to some agreement.

>BTW: I am writing to you directly because my browser crashes when I try 
>to use the web page form to "Contact Sales".

You are not writing to me directly.  You are writing to a mailing list.
And, it sounds like you probably want to be using a better browser.

cgf

>Thanks for the latest scoop,

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