On Sat, 2005-22-01 at 20:22 -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote: > On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 05:17:44PM -0800, Brian Dessent wrote: > >John Mellor wrote: > >>Correct me if I'm mistaken, but if I'm going to make a few dollars off > >>of a non-free something that links in an open source library, I need to > >>provide the source for the open-source parts with the product, or fall > >>afoul of the LGPL. So, to make everybody happy, I believe that all I > >>need to add, is to provide the source for cygwin1.dll to the Customer. > > > >I don't know if the ancient Bxx series was LGPL, but the current Cygwin > >source is GPL which means you must provide not only the Cygwin DLL > >source but also all the source of your app that links to it. > > > >There is a mailing list to discuss this: cygwin-licensing at cygwin dot > >com. > > I think that cygwin has been GPL since early 1997. > > So, you're right. I can't believe I missed this. Anything that uses the > Cygwin DLL is GPLed.
In fact, I cannot ship the source for the app if I wanted to, as that would then publish some of the Customer's proprietary trade secrets. However, if I read the specific version of the GPL that is being used for cygwin correctly, then it says: > In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs > whose sources are distributed under a license that complies with the > Open Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll > without libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll itself causing the resulting program > to be covered by the GNU GPL. > > This means that you can port an Open Source(tm) application to cygwin, > and distribute that executable as if it didn't include a copy of > libcygwin.a/cygwin1.dll linked into it. Note that this does not apply > to the cygwin DLL itself. If you distribute a (possibly modified) > version of the DLL you must adhere to the terms of the GPL, i.e. you > must provide sources for the cygwin DLL. I believe that my app meets this criteria, and this then prevents me from being between a rock and a hard place ;^) -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/