Cygnus Cygwin32 Press Release 1/21/97

[Richard Watts]

On  11 February 1997, Stan Shebs
<shebs@cygnus.com> wrote:

>garp@opustel.com (Keith Gary Boyce ) writes:
>
>> Will someone from cygnus define commercial. Does that mean if you say
>> something like "If you like send $x to y" that's fine and you don't need a 
>> licence. And if you produce binarys and say something like this does that
>> mean you are also obligated to share source code for free. 
>
>Jeremy had it pretty accurate, but "commercial" is not entirely
>relevant.  Technically, if you use the GPLed library in a freeware
>app, then you would have to make the app's sources available upon
>request to anyone you gave the binary to (note: not to just anyone,
>just those that *you* gave it to).

 From version 2 of the GNU General Public License:

>  2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
>of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
>distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
>above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
[snip]
>   b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
>    whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
>    part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
>    parties under the terms of this License.

 I presume that you're considering linking with cygwin.dll to be
making a derivative work[1], and if so this would seem to indicate
that you must make sources available to anyone who wants them 
(indeed, you could argue that it institutes a duty of distribution).
>From my point of view (as a contractor[2]), this makes using
cygwin quite untenable - my clients are understandably unlikely
to pay for software (which may embed their trade secrets) which
is then released to all their competitors (though they seem
quite prepared to allow me to release various non-trade-secret
bits of it).
 
 There are also horrible arguments about whether modificationss in 
separate source files constitute aggregation or modification
(note that dependency is not a good discriminator because
of bug dependencies, and problems with eg. bash shell scripts 
falling under the GPL).

[1] this is dodgy anyway, since it could be argued that this is
dynamic linkage, and therefore just constitutes aggregation, in the
same way that MS can't claim rights over programs which link with
kernel32.dll.

[2] ie. my clients own the source code anyway.
 

>  In practice, I would expect that
>we would not bother to pursue any such cases - not much to be gained
>by it. 

 True, however there are two problems with this :

(i) Corporate lawyers tend to get jumpy.
(ii) In the UK, in some cases, breach of copyright is a criminal
offence. This could cause problems if some third party (dare
I mention the SPA ?) decided to press charges.

> However, I personally would like to encourage freeware authors
>to make their sources available; there is an unfortunate tendency in
>the PC and Mac world to distribute binaries and hoard sources, which
>makes it much less likely that programmers can learn from each other.

SWITCH AOL
 Me too :-).
SWITCH NOAOL


Richard.
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