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Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:18:28 +1000
From: Luke Kendall <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
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Subject: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
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The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most 
Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how 
that's a license), and some are public domain.

I'm just wondering what's the recommended way to check that use of 
Cygwin internally at a company (no re-distribution) complies with all 
the licenses.

Obviously, if Cygwin (Red Hat?) provided answers to the above questions, 
it would save an enormous amount of repeated legal work. (N hours per 
license per company that uses Cygwin.)

1. Is there a complete list of all the licenses used by all the packages 
(rather than the above broad statement about an incomplete set of the 
licenses)?

2. Do you provide a statement that the licenses are compatible with each 
other?

3. Do you provide a statement that no package is licensed under terms 
that disallow commercial use?

4. Does each package have a license?  (If not, I don't understand how 
someone could legally use it - is there some implied license if none is 
provided?)

To be fair, apart from a "Yes" to question 2 for Debian/Ubuntu, I don't 
know the answers to questions 1, 3 & 4 for Linux distributions, either.

Hopefully,

luke

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