From: noer AT cygnus DOT com (Geoffrey Noer) Subject: Re: Cygnus Win32 and GNU Win32 29 Oct 1998 18:56:31 -0800 Message-ID: <19981029004647.32055.cygnus.gnu-win32@cygnus.com> References: <199810272337 DOT PAA05391 AT vision DOT ucsd DOT edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii To: Andy Tai Cc: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Andy Tai wrote: > > Seeing the change of name from GNU-Win32 to CygWin32, I am just curious > what is the general consideration of the leadership at Cygnus. Is > gradually GNU software drafted away from the FSF? Is Cygnus > gradually becoming indepenet of the GNU ideas? Although I don't speak for Cygnus officially, I'll try to answer this as well as I can... Cygnus started out selling support and contract services for the GNU compiler tools (gcc, gdb, et al) as the core technology of its business (back in 1989). Today, Cygnus engineers make the majority of changes to the development tools and essentially all of those changes are integrated into future FSF releases. That said, Cygnus is not the FSF and never will be. As you point out, Cygnus is a for-profit corporation for one thing. But that doesn't preclude being strongly committed to open source software, including the GNU tools. Recently, Cygnus announced eCos, the Embedded Cygnus Operating System, an open-source, royalty-free, Commercial-grade RTOS for embedded systems. While eCos isn't GNU, it is still open source and will be freely available. Our new sourceware initiative (see http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ for more information) consolidates in one place a number of open source packages Cygnus is involved with, including eCos and Cygwin. With respect to Cygwin, the Cygwin tools have always been open source and will continue to be. But the Cygwin library has never been a GNU library. For that matter, not all of the software included in the distributions is GNU software. So calling the project "GNU-Win32" was a bit of a misnomer. In addition, we think that calling the tools the "Cygwin tools" that use the "Cygwin library" will be less confusing to people. > Regarding Cygwin32, contributions to the project must > copyright-assigned to Cygnus. Correct. Cygwin library changes do indeed have to be copyright-assigned to Cygnus. > While assigning copyright to the FSF is understandable > in its purpose, I wonder what is the goal of assigning rights to > Cygnus? After all, Cygnus is a for-profit corporation, unlike the > FSF which has clearly understandable goals and purposes. If I > contribute to Cygwin32, can I assign my copyright to the FSF, > instead of Cygnus? As in the case of the FSF for its GNU software packages, Cygnus wants a single entity to own Cygwin. The assignment forms and employer disclaimers help ensure that Cygnus won't be sued by a Net contributor's employer for incorporating their code changes in Cygwin or some such thing. In addition, Cygnus made the decision to keep the library under the GPL which effectively prevents legal use of the Cygwin library in non-GPL'd commercial packages. For those companies who want to use it in a proprietary package, Cygnus sells a commercial license for this purpose. (And that's part of where my group's salaries come from). For that reason, an assignment to the FSF wouldn't work. I would like to reassure potential contributors that their changes are guaranteed to always remain free software. For one thing, Cygnus is committed to keeping Cygwin an open source package. Although I think Cygnus' track record with respect to staying committed to open source software is pretty good, you don't have to agree. Imagine that at some point Cygnus (stupidly) decides to make Cygwin completely proprietary and stop involving the Net in its development. Cygnus would not legally be able to take back existing releases -- in fact, as soon as a development snapshot is put out, that particular release is permanently under the GPL. So the Net could always choose to diverge from Cygnus if that was warranted. Obviously, Cygwin library divergence is something we really hope will stay in the realm of the potential. I sincerely hope that those of us involved in Cygwin development at Cygnus will be able to successfully lead the project forward and make Cygwin continue to flourish as time goes on. The key to that is maintaining a good relationship with the Net community. Starting with a B20 release in time for Halloween (which I hope won't scare people too much), you should soon see some additional positive developments with the project, including regular binary updates to the Cygwin DLL available on the project ftp server. We are also planning to make the latest development sources available via anonymous CVS from sourceware.cygnus.com so that Net developers will always have access to the very latest version of Cygwin. (If there is still a demand for regular snapshots in addition, we may continue to do that as well). Finally, in order to speed up this list and make it easier to maintain, we are looking into moving this mailing list to the new sourceware server and changing mailers/mailing list software (at which point we may well change its name to cygwin AT cygnus DOT com). I'll announce all of this as it happens... OK, 'nuff said I think. Time to get back to work on B20... Best regards, Geoffrey Noer noer AT cygnus DOT com - 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".