Subject: Re: standalone cygwin programs that use "/tmp" don't work
From: Christopher Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: "John R. McPherson" <[email-masked]>
Cc: Corinna Vinschen <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 12:47:50 -0400

On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 07:44:10PM +1200, John R. McPherson wrote:
>I replied to this to Corinna, but as I got an error message from the
>list server I had no idea who got it or not.  So I've forwarded the
>bounced message - see below.

Corinna's original message had set the Reply-To to the cygwin mailing
list.  My message didn't do that but you replied to the list anyway.
Hmm.

>> If you are distributing GPLed binaries like the cygwin DLL, tar, wget,
>> etc.  you need to also make the source code available.  It doesn't
>> matter that the source code is available elsewhere on the web.
>
>We have the source code to wget, pdftohtml, etc available for download
>as part of the "source code" download link that is on the website
>I referenced. Some of these packages have been very slightly modified (mostly
>Makefiles). As I said, our project is all GPL and GPL-compatible
>code.

Ok.  You're providing some sources but not all.  That's a little
mystifying to me.  I don't know why you chose to provide sources for
wget, pdftohtml, etc.  but not for the cygwin DLL, tar, gzip, bzip2, or
unzip.

>We use the cygwin dll as downloaded from a cygwin mirror. So you want
>us to mirror the whole cygwin source code as well, in New Zealand,
>where we have to pay data charges for international traffic in both
>directions? The GPL says that if someone we give binaries
>to asks us for the source code, we are obliged to do so. I don't
>see how we're not complying...

How you are not complying is that you are apparently not providing the
source code for the DLL and other random binaries.  I'm not sure how
this was unclear from my original message.  Are you saying that you have
the source code available for such things as the cygwin dll and tar and
that if someone asks you'll provide it?  If so, I think you probably
should make that clear on your web site.

I'm only asking that you make available the cygwin DLL sources and any
other GPLed sources that you are using.  The cygwin sources are 3878779
bytes.  The tar sources are 967054 bytes.  The other packages (with the
possible exception of perl) are not that large either.

Let me restate it:  You can't rely on the fact that the source code
is "freely available".  As I mentioned, that won't be the case for long
with cygwin 1.3.10.

My suggestion would be to just make the source code available and
include a line that says "Please don't use this.  It is just here for
GPL compliance." or something like that.

cgf

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