On May 13, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Yaakov Selkowitz wrote: > > On 2016-05-13 10:38, Warren Young wrote: > >> But after taking a peek at the AST license, it’s pretty clear it’s >> incompatible >> with the GPL. > > True, but it is Open Source and therefore would be acceptable.
It depends on what “it” is. The old AT&T AST license was most definitely not acceptable, requiring written acceptance of the license in order to transfer the source code. You may remember the clickthrough license on the old AT&T AST site. That’s fine for AT&T, but it doesn’t let Cygwin distribute source packages, for example. There are other onerous terms in the AST license, too, such as a requirement that you tell AT&T in writing any time you made a patch to their software. Thus if it doesn’t build OOTB on Cygwin, we couldn’t distribute it in binary-only form, either. All of that apparently went away at some point, though, because the header comment in a few of the ksh source files I looked at say it’s under the Eclipse Public License now: https://github.com/att/ast The old AST wasn’t even compatible with GitHub — no explicit license acceptance on git clone — but I think we can trust that as an official distribution of the ksh source code, since AT&T themselves link to the GitHub repo from here: http://www.research.att.com/software_tools So never mind, I think we’re in the clear here. But IANAL. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
