RedHat != FSF

[stefan <stefan at lkcc dot org>]

On Sat, 4 Nov 2000, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> This does mean that you can't just take code owned by someone else (the
> FSF owns glibc) and plonk it into cygwin.  You couldn't go in the other
> direction either.  If that were possible, we certainly would have
> grabbed a lot of code from glibc by now.
> 
> Just so it is clear -- Red Hat actually does sell Cygwin occasionally.
> On Sat, Nov 04, 2000 at 08:14:05PM +0100, stefan wrote:
> >I forgot: All this contribution/assign thingies are far to complicated
> >for me as a programmer.  It makes it unnecessarily delay.  As I
> >concluded from what i read RedHat is the owner of the cygwin1.dll ?  So
> >why is there a "net community" helping so much ???
> 
> I don't understand the question.  Are you using Cygwin?  Are you
> benefitting from it?  Why wouldn't you want to help out on a free
> software project regardless of who owns the code?  Just about all of the
> code distributed under the GPL is owned by someone.

Yes, i am benefitting.

> I don't enjoy having to jump through legal hoops getting people to
> sign over their changes to the DLL but it is a necessary evil.
> 
> We provide "buy out" licenses to customers that allow the customer to
> provide software that they've written to use the Cygwin DLL without
> "infecting" their code with the GPL.

That might be quite complicated too, if these people who do not want to
get "infected" start using the libraries Cygwin additionally puts to their
distribution because most of them are GPL'd.

> So, if you would like to be offended by the fact that Red Hat owns
> Cygwin, your next step is to be outraged that your efforts could
> actually be sold to customers.  Your only cold consolation would be that
> if you make a positive change to Cygwin, your changes will be
> appreciated by many thousands of people who never paid a dime for it and
> any improvements that are made to Cygwin that result in an actual sale
> is another reason for Red Hat to continue funding the development.
> 
> Because, of course, you are all benefitting from Red Hat's funding of
> development.  Despite the fact that much of what DJ, Corinna, and I do
> in this mailing list and for the net community (do you think that Red
> Hat needs a setup.exe which downloads from the internet?) is on a
> volunteer basis, I doubt that you would see continued steady development
> if all of us were whisked to other projects.

Of course i do appreciated the work you guys have done. But now i also
realized why the MinGW project has started... Please do not mind my
opinion about commercial software anyway. 

stefan@lkcc.org


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