From: jqb AT netcom DOT com (Jim Balter) Subject: Re: Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97 10 Feb 1997 21:25:09 -0800 Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <32FFEEF4.7EC9.cygnus.gnu-win32@netcom.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (WinNT; I) Original-To: Keith Gary Boyce Original-CC: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Keith Gary Boyce wrote: > > I agree I have no copyright on any of the code but I did send in patches > for header files and I did port wxwindows to gnu-win32 platform. Also > i've seen other patches sent in by several other people (thus the use > of the term collective). Unless Cygnus is going to charge people for wxwindows, it hardly seems relevant. As for patches, what percentage of cygwin.dll (remember, *only* cygwin.dll is relevant here; patches to GNU utilities or anything else that Cygnus does not have the copyright for are irrelevant) is made up of such patches? > No problem with cygnus doing anything they want in fact. The only problem > I have is that I can't do anything I want. You can collect up all the patches you have seen, ask the authors for their right to use them just to be sure, and build your own cygwin-like library. > In fact even that is not that > important since I have no aspirations to make money through this project. > What I view is a problem is what I have heard while working with people not > associated with cygnus (regarding porting their programs over to win95). > It seems everyone is excited at first about not having to be tied to > microsoft or borland but when it becomes apparent that they have to share > their source code they become disinterested in using gcc. Using gcc does not force people to share their source code (I don't think; see below). cygwin.dll is not gcc. > The reason why it > is important to convert people over to using gcc is that the more people > that are involved the more likely it is that progress is made. > (Linux effort for instance). If people are willing to give away their > programs for free but not willing to part with their source code and > with gnu-win32 they can't then that is a problem. You are mixing up gcc with gnu-win32. Cygnus apparently no longer shares the FSF philosophy towards free software. That's their right, of course. That it is a "problem" for others who also don't share the FSF philosophy that they don't get to both use Cygnus's code and hoard their own seems like a fitting problem, to me. > My mailing is not so say that cygnus has done anything wrong. In fact > I think that they have been very good to us giving us a free compiler > for windows. I believe you can use the compiler, which is under the LGPL, and still hoard your source. > I am just trying to say that to bring others to this effort > in thousands rather than hundreds we at least have to be able to produce > native binaries without cygnus's library. You can already do that with mingw32, so what's the issue here? mingw32 isn't a Cygnus project and isn't affected by Cygnus's decision in re cygwin.dll, I don't think. Unless the fact that gcc itself uses cygwin.dll infects programs compiled with gcc, but I don't think so (I'd have to read the GPL and LGPL again very carefully to be sure). -- - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".