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Re: Re[4]: ANNOUNCE selfhosting mingw32


On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:

> 
>    Well, let's clarify the issues.

Yes, let's. This is just a clarification however, and I'm not going to 
participate in this discussion any further. 

>    So, you started with mingw32, which is in the public domain, and
> made some patches to it, which you put in public domain. Is this true?
> If yes, then what I stress is that your runtime Posix library doesn't
> bear GPL with it. Well, when some GPLed software compiled with it,
> whole result is GPLed. But when non-GPL source compiled - result is
> free to be distributed without all the boring sources. That's exactly
> the ability Cygwin is lacking of.

Mingw is not entirely in the public domain. The runtime *sources* that
make up crt?.o, dllcrt?.o and libmingw32.a are; the profiling code is
*GPL*, the w32api headers and import libraries are LGPL. This mix of
licensing/copyrights is not likely to change.

What this means that your mingw32 executables are not under any
restriction, unless you have profiling enabled. Also, if you modify
the w32api import libraries and headers, you must also distribute the 
source.  Anyone who doesn't like it is of course free to choose an 
alternative.

Regards,
Mumit



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