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Re: Licensing for academic computer labs at a university


Actually, if the are university computers, then only university needs to
have access to the source.  The GPL only requires that if you are distribute
the binaries, that you also distribute the source.  It says nothing about
providing source for your own computers.  That is true for both an
individual and an institution.  However, if students are allowed to copy the
Cygwin distribution off the computers then they need to have access to the
source.  A single network shared directory would be sufficient for normal
sized computer lab, since few of the students would want to download a more
than one or two source packages.

BTW.  A base CYGWIN distribution is only about 15 MB's.  Source is another
18 MB's.  So the whole thing can fit on one of the mini-CDROM disks with a
huge amount of space to spare.  If you pick and choose which packages you
want, you can easily fit all the binaries and source on a single cd.
If you want a full distribution, then use one CDROM for source and one for
binaries.

                        Bill


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Igor Pechtchanski" <pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu>
To: <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 10:39 PM
Subject: Re: Licensing for academic computer labs at a university


> Scott,
>
> Note that the GPL only requires you to provide the source for the binaries
> you distribute.  So, if you set up a shared network drive with the sources
> that were pre-installed on the hard-drives, that should be quite enough to
> satisfy the GPL (however, IANAL, so please consult a lawyer if you are
> worried about licensing).  If the students update their installations,
> they should be able to get the new sources from wherever they got the
> binaries anyway.
>
> Also note that not all the packages available from Cygwin mirrors are used
> by (or useful to) the general public -- some are highly specialized, and
> thus don't have to be included into your distribution (e.g., lilypond or
> xinetd or rsync, unless your students typeset sheet music, or administer
> their Windows services through Cygwin, or maintain mirrors, respectively).
> Some also have similar functionality, e.g., pdksh and astksh, so there's a
> tradeoff between functionality and code size, since you won't need both
> packages.
> Igor
> -- 
> http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
>       |\      _,,,---,,_ pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
> ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_ igor@watson.ibm.com
>      |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-' Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
>     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!
>
> "I have since come to realize that being between your mentor and his route
> to the bathroom is a major career booster."  -- Patrick Naughton
>
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