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Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Sep 29 19:18, Luke Kendall wrote:
The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how that's a license), and some are public domain.

I'm just wondering what's the recommended way to check that use of Cygwin internally at a company (no re-distribution) complies with all the licenses.

Obviously, if Cygwin (Red Hat?) provided answers to the above questions, it would save an enormous amount of repeated legal work. (N hours per license per company that uses Cygwin.)

First of all, it might depend on the selection of packages you made since, obviously, licenses of packages which you don't use are no concern for you.

Of course. But assuming one chooses to install everything ...


Um, and assuming that we found a list of packages that had no licenses, and a list of packages with licenses that we can't accept, is there any way to supply setup with a pre-defined list of packages to include or exclude? Or would everyone installing Cygwin at our company have to read through a list of disallowed-by-our-company packages and deselect each one (after first clicking on All)?

So, sure, Red Hat *could* do that, but that would mean to take over
responsibility for something which is in the responsibility of the user
in the first place.  Eventually only a lawyer can make sure you comply,
but, apart from the responsibility, the job of a lawyer isn't exactly
for free.  So this is a job to redirect to *your* legal department.

I don't think my four questions asked for legal advice, they were about asking if someone had done the groundwork to enable legal checks to be of only normal difficulty. By that I mean, normally you get the license(s) text, you don't have to hunt for that.


As an engineer, it seems inefficient if every company that wants to use Cygwin first has to spend several days/weeks finding all the licenses across 2000(?) packages, distilling the license files down into a set, find any that forbid commercial use, checking that the remaining licenses are compatible with each other, and *then, finally* checking each unique license in the usual way.

A list of licenses used in Cygwin packages is in the cygwin-docs
package, plus, every package with a non-standard license typically
provides it under /usr/share/doc/<packagename>.

Thanks, that's very helpful, and is an excellent example of how some collected information can save a lot of companies a lot of work to check they can use Cygwin.


Using your information, I can create a script that produces a list of all the licenses. I guess if the license files themselves have varying names (ideally they'd all be just "license.txt"), I may need to then add some heuristics to pick the license file out. From that I can then create something that produces just a set of the unique licenses. And then I can pass that to our legal department.

I can also diff it against new Cygwin releases to identify changes to licenses and new licenses added for new packages.

However, there's no
guarantee that the list is complete.

Erk, that sounds scary. Does that mean the process for adding new packages doesn't include adding the license information into the license list? Would that be a process improvement that could be considered for the future?


As for licenses with commercial exceptions, personally (IANAL, and I'm
not speaking for Red Hat, nor for the Cygwin community at large, nor did
I actually search for it) I think there is none in the distro, except
for the Cygwin license itself.

I can't see anything in http://cygwin.com/licensing.html that says Cygwin can't be used for commercial purposes (thank goodness!). Maybe you meant something else.


And that only applies to exceptions from
the GPL.

Other than that, licensing questions should better go to the
cygwin-licensing mailing list.

I didn't know it existed. Sorry. I'd better subscribe to it, and I'll take my questions there, and stop troubling this list.


Thanks again,

luke

Corinna



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