cygwin licensing question

[William Deegan]

I'd also take a look at this:
https://cygwin.com/licensing.html

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 4:04 PM Brian Inglis <
Brian.Inglis@systematicsw.ab.ca> wrote:

> On 2020-02-26 09:37, MrPmghost . wrote:
> > I am Pierre Meignen, software developer working for a belgium company.
> > I have a question regarding cygwin and its use.
> > Is it allowed/legal to integrate cygwin installer (2.11.1(0.329/5/3))
> into
> > the installer of an application that we plan to distribute commercially?
> > I have checked the past cygwin posts but I did not see any clear answer
> to
> > my question.
> > I know how to handle source code in LGPL but I have difficulty to
> > understand what I can do with cygwin (LGPL) but which also contains tools
> > covered by the GNU GPL and so on.
> > We have customized cygwin installer in order to install locally the
> > necessary packages.
> > Once in its execution, our application launches cygwin.bat and launch
> > commands to upload embedded systems.
> > We do not link towards cygwin.dll.
>                          cygwin1.dll
>
> > We currently use the application internally but we plan to distribute it
> > commerically in the future.
> > Thanks in advance for your support/feedback,
>
> [Disclaimer: I am not any kind of lawyer or project lead just another
> volunteer]
>
> Cygwin is not a formal organization and has no officers or lawyers, at best
> volunteer project co-leads and maintainers with commit privileges to
> primary
> source repositories.
>
> Cygwin is an online project which has volunteers around the world
> collaboratively maintaining a collection of packages archived and
> distributed on
> third party donated and supported domain names and infrastructure.
>
> Copyright and licence compliance is your responsibility if you download any
> binaries or sources. As you are based in Belgium in the EU you also have to
> comply with Belgian and EU law which may have stricter copyright and
> licensing
> compliance requirements.
>
> Each package comes with its own licensing terms, including cygwin
> (cygwin1.dll)
> and setup (setup_x86{_64}.exe), usually under (case insensitively):
>
>         /usr/share/{,doc/}PACKAGE{,-doc}/*{COPY,LICEN}*
> or
>         /usr/share/doc/common-licenses
>
> You will have to provide your corporate lawyers with the licences for each
> package you wish to include in your product.
>
> Your corporate lawyers will have to determine what responsibilities you
> have
> related to package licensing requirements, what you must do (e.g. publish
> and
> attribute all copyrights and licences in your product distribution and
> documentation, distribute and provide online source archives, and submit
> patches
> upstream, etc.), and how you are limited by the licences in what you may
> do with
> each package.
>
> As so many packages are licensed under the [L]GPL2/3 or by the FSF if GNU
> sourced, see https://www.fsf.org/licensing/ your corporate lawyers may
> want to
> work with the FSF Licensing and Compliance Team mailto:licensing@fsf.org
> or
> their lawyers mailto:legal@fsf.org as Cygwin has no lawyers.
>
> In general, you probably need to document, track, submit, and log
> submission of
> any modifications you make to any Cygwin package source code as patches to
> cygwin-apps@cygwin.com, or upstream to the upstream package maintainer or
> source
> given in the package source archive, often shown in a .cygport file.
>
> Question for project leads - who maintains the maintainer copyright
> assignments,
> attributions, disclaimers, releases, etc. and where, or is that all also
> only in
> some mail archives?
>
> --
> Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
>
> This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains
> too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.
>
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