Re: test report on ver 1.1.5-4

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2000 at 08:14:05PM +0100, stefan wrote:
>I forgot: All this contribution/assign thingies are far to complicated
>for me as a programmer.  It makes it unnecessarily delay.  As I
>concluded from what i read RedHat is the owner of the cygwin1.dll ?  So
>why is there a "net community" helping so much ???

I don't understand the question.  Are you using Cygwin?  Are you
benefitting from it?  Why wouldn't you want to help out on a free
software project regardless of who owns the code?  Just about all of the
code distributed under the GPL is owned by someone.

I don't enjoy having to jump through legal hoops getting people to
sign over their changes to the DLL but it is a necessary evil.

This does mean that you can't just take code owned by someone else (the
FSF owns glibc) and plonk it into cygwin.  You couldn't go in the other
direction either.  If that were possible, we certainly would have
grabbed a lot of code from glibc by now.

Just so it is clear -- Red Hat actually does sell Cygwin occasionally.
We provide "buy out" licenses to customers that allow the customer to
provide software that they've written to use the Cygwin DLL without
"infecting" their code with the GPL.

So, if you would like to be offended by the fact that Red Hat owns
Cygwin, your next step is to be outraged that your efforts could
actually be sold to customers.  Your only cold consolation would be that
if you make a positive change to Cygwin, your changes will be
appreciated by many thousands of people who never paid a dime for it and
any improvements that are made to Cygwin that result in an actual sale
is another reason for Red Hat to continue funding the development.

Because, of course, you are all benefitting from Red Hat's funding of
development.  Despite the fact that much of what DJ, Corinna, and I do
in this mailing list and for the net community (do you think that Red
Hat needs a setup.exe which downloads from the internet?) is on a
volunteer basis, I doubt that you would see continued steady development
if all of us were whisked to other projects.

Oops.  It's already happened to DJ.  I expect that his new gcc duties
will leave him much less time to work on setup.exe.  So, there, we
certainly could use net volunteers.

cgf

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