Licensing

DJ Delorie dj@delorie.com
Mon Apr 9 09:10:00 GMT 2001


I see nothing in the license that would stop it from meeting the open
source definition if one chose to comply with the OSD, but then again,
I see nothing in the license that requires that it conform to the open
source definition either.  If one chose to make extensive
modifications to make it work under Cygwin, and did not make those
modifications available in an OSD way, then the resulting binary does
not qualify for the exception.

Thus, it falls to the question of how it was ported to cygwin - if any
changes needed to make it work under Cygwin are also available under
the OSD, I'd say yes, it qualifies for Cygwin's exception.  The
general rule of thumb is "if the user can get the sources somehow, and
rebuild them to make a working executable functionally identical to
the one we gave them, and further redistribute them under the terms of
the OSD, then Cygwin's GPL won't apply to the EXE."

You still have to distribute the sources to OpenLDAP, but under their
own license (and you're allowed to just point back to their web site,
if those sources are sufficient), and if you include cygwin1.dll, then
you must comply with the GPL for cygwin1.dll itself.

If, for some reason, in the future the OpenLDAP sources are no longer
available, the exception would then no longer apply.

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