Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97

[Keith Gary Boyce]

I agree I have no copyright on any of the code but I did send in patches
for header files and I did port wxwindows to gnu-win32 platform. Also
i've seen other patches sent in by several other people (thus the use
of the term collective). 

No problem with cygnus doing anything they want in fact. The only problem
I have is that I can't do anything I want.. In fact even that is not that
important since I have no aspirations to make money through this project.
What I view is a problem is what I have heard while working with people not 
associated with cygnus (regarding porting their programs over to win95).
It seems everyone is excited at first about not having to be tied to
microsoft or borland but when it becomes apparent that they have to share
their source code they become disinterested in using gcc. The reason why it
is important to convert people over to using gcc is that the more people
that are involved the more likely it is that progress is made.
(Linux effort for instance). If people are willing to give away their
programs for free but not willing to part with their source code and
with gnu-win32 they can't then that is a problem.

My mailing is not so say that cygnus has done anything wrong. In fact
I think that they have been very good to us giving us a free compiler
for windows. I am just trying to say that to bring others to this effort
in thousands rather than hundreds we at least have to be able to produce
native binaries without cygnus's library.

--- On Sun, 09 Feb 1997 20:07:23 -0800  Jim Balter <jqb@netcom.com> wrote:
Keith Gary Boyce wrote:
> 
> So that was the plan.. Cygnus does actually have a plan to make money
> from our collective effort. I applaud them for this since everyone 
deserves
> to be able to make money for their efforts.

Collective effort?  I don't see your copyright on any of the code.
I suppose Microsoft, Netscape, et. al. should give all the beta testers
royalties as a reward for their "collective effort", eh?

> Unfortunently what they are
> saying is only they can make money from this effort.

The software is free, so they can say it but it isn't so.
Cygnus can make money off of support, as they have always done
(see their motto); you can too, and they can't stop you.  But if they
think they can make money off of licenses for cygwin.dll, they are
dreaming (I won't even comment about the claims about "most
complete", "true compatibility", and "POSIX" in that press release,
except that the latter opens them up to a lawsuit if they haven't been
POSIX-certified).  They have already given the code away under the GPL.
They can put any new developments (which would *certainly* not be
"collective") under a different copyright and hoard the source.
If they don't hoard the source, then to allow commercial customers to
use it in proprietary products they have to put it under the LGPL, and
once they have done that anyone can include it in a proprietary product
without paying for a license.

> What we collectively
> need to do is assist in the development of minimal gnu-win32 so that we 
can
> also aspire to make money if we so desire.

You always have to option not to use code under the GPL.
If mingw32 doesn't include any, then that's one of the infinite ways
to do so.

--
<J Q B>
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---------------End of Original Message-----------------

-------------------------------------
Name: Garry Boyce
E-mail: garp@opustel.opustel.com (Garry Boyce)
Date: 02/10/97
Time: 08:22:48

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