From: gordoni AT cygnus DOT com (Gordon Irlam) Subject: Re: Revised Cygwin32 licensing terms 9 Jul 1997 16:53:10 -0700 Sender: mail AT cygnus DOT com Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199707092244.PAA09045.cygnus.gnu-win32@snuffle.cygnus.com> Original-To: abraham AT dina DOT kvl DOT dk (Per Abrahamsen) Original-Cc: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com In-Reply-To: from "Per Abrahamsen" at Jul 9, 97 11:32:54 pm X-Web: http://www.base.com/gordoni/gordoni.html X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com > It looks like "cygwin.dll" can no longer be used in GPL'ed > applications. The added restrictions against competitors conflict > with the GPL's prohibition against adding further restrictions. This is wrong for several reasons: a) At a technical level, the US copyright act does not impose any restrictions on use. Copyright only restricts reproduction, preparation of derivative works, and distribution. GPL'ed and non-GPL'ed applications are both free to make use cygwin.dll. b) A GPL'ed application and cygwin.dll are, for copyright purposes, considered separate works. The GPL only comes into play if a GPL'ed worked is combined with another work to create a derivative work. cygwin.dll is a dynamic library, and it is not combined with other works (in a copyright sense) to create a derivative work. Other works only perform calls to the cygwin.dll. So distributing a GPL'ed work and cygwin.dll separately, even on the same media, does not cause any conflicts with the GPL. c) The creation of RAM resident images derived from multiple works does not constitute the creation a derivative work. This was argued at the recent WIPO diplomatic conference, and fortunately the US position, that temporary copies should be considered derivative works, was defeated. (Incidentally, if such laws ever passed, it would be very bad for the s/w industry as a whole. Microsoft could use them to control who was allowed to develop applications for the Windows platform, and on the web people could use them to prevent the cacheing of web pages). d) In addition, cygwin.dll essentially provides a Unix operating system emulation layer, and so it's use by a GPL'ed application is essentially no different than the use of any other operating system layer. The fact that an O/S is not under the GPL does not prevent the O/S from being used by GPL'ed applications. e) We were concerned about ensuring Cygwin32 could continue to be used by GPL'ed applications. If you read the license carefully you will notice we removed all restrictions on the use of libcygwin.a. Our reason for doing this was because unlike cygwin.dll, libcygwin.a is linked into GPL'ed applications, and the result thus constitutes a derivative work. Because of this, and our desire to ensure Cygwin32 could be used in conjunction with GPL'ed applications, we decided to remove all restrictions from the use of libcygwin.a. Gordon Irlam Cygnus Solutions - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".