-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Barry Smith at SourceLink on 9/23/2008 10:00 AM: > First, > > LIST: I apologize for hurting anyone's feelings. > Charles has decided to respond in a not-so-receptive tone because I > use RAR in my CygWIN scripts, and Charles > (apparently) feels that using NON-CygWIN-distributed tools in CygWIN > should not be allowed.
You seem to have missed the point. We agree that there is nothing technically stopping you from using RAR: yes, you can copy a rar implementation into your cygwin directory, and like any other non-cygwin program, invoke it programatically from cygwin scripts. The point is that rar is non-free software - it is patent and license encumbered, and as such, will not be made part of the official cygwin release, not because it isn't technically possible, but because it is not legally possible. > I also dual-boot Windows AND Linux. I guess that I'm the most evil > person in the world, now. Dual booting does not make you evil (but top-posting, full-quoting, and quoting raw email addresses from mail headers are all good candidates, since they violate list policy, and you have already done all three, repeatedly). > Hmmm... I guess (in your vision) OpenSource has no purpose in CygWIN... I > guess that's an opinion... Rather narrow, but it's an opinion. Wrong. Cygwin is ALL about open source - everything on the cygwin site comes with source code, and is thus open for you to recompile or modify. But more important than open source is the freedom to do things with that source. Whether or not rar is free (as in beer) has no bearing - the point that we are making is that rar is NOT free (as in speech) - we are not legally permitted to link it with cygwin1.dll. Thus, any further discussions about the technical merits of the rar file format, whether or not they are good arguments, are off-topic for this list. > > I also wonder why you feel that anything that runs under CygWIN must be > distributed by CygWIN. You are mistaken. We don't feel that way. As part of your freedom (as in speech) inherent in using cygwin, you may place whatever you would like in your cygwin directory structure. Just don't expect us to support it, or to care about your rants about how amazing your programs are, if they were not downloaded from cygwin.com. In other words, telling us about winrar is a waste of our time, since it does not pertain to the charter of this mailing list. Nothing against your program, per se, but against your choice of audience. > By extension of this idea, Do you also believe that > CygWIN "owns" all of the CygWIN scripts that I write, that parse my Windows > directories and log selected WINDOWS files that I use with OpenSource > utilities that run under Windows (the same operating system that CygWIN > couldn't execute without). No, the GPL does not mean that cygwin.com owns your modifications. In fact, it means the exact opposite - it means you have the freedom to make modifications without having to tell us about it, so long as you in turn give those freedoms to others (and even then, only if you choose to exercise the freedom of redistributing your modifications). - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkjZkugACgkQ84KuGfSFAYCQCgCgvsMOegcOchyJ17537eULh3Aa p60AniV+g3cCf2dzNuSALwvuW3cFOcll =Omme -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- 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/
