Re: Commercial Licensing

[Jim Balter <jqb at netcom dot com>]

David Essex wrote:
> 
> Ian Lance Taylor <ian@cygnus.com> wrote:
> 
> >BFD, gas, ld, the binutils, are all under the GPL
> >and always have been.  Any contributions you or anybody chooses to
> >make will be made under the GPL, will require a copyright assignment
> >to the Free Software Foundation, and will be included in future
> >binutils net releases for anybody to use.
> >
> >The commercial licensing stuff applies only to the gnu win32 library
> >itself, which is copyrighted by Cygnus.  It does not apply to the
> >binutils.
> Commercial licensing ?
> The cygnus gnu-win32 web page says that this is free software.
> If win32 library is part of gnu why do you need a commercial license ?
> Could some one expand on this ?


In addition to the GPL, Cygnus offers cygwin.dll under a restricted
license to commercial clients who wish to use it without sharing their
own sources.  As the owner, Cygnus has every legal right to do this.
Whether it is consistent with the spirit of the GPL is another matter.
There was a long, heated debate on the mailing list after Cygnus
posted a press release announcing their intentions; no sense in
repeating it.

Note that many libraries, such as glibc, are released under the LGPL,
not the GPL, implicitly allowing commercial users to do what commercial
users of cygwin must pay Cygnus for a license to do.  Cygnus
intentionally used the GPL rather than the LGPL for just this reason.

--
<J Q B>
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