Re: Licensing/Installer Questions

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Mar  1 02:46, Michael Banks wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Our company has released a commercial product for the medical industry
> called SpongePACS ( http://www.spongepacs.com ). It was developed in a
> database program called FileMaker Pro, which has the ability to access
> the command line. In fact, SpongePACS relies heavily on utilities like
> grep and find, which come with a standard installation of Mac OS X.
> 
> Since we want to also target the larger Windows user base, we need to
> find Windows equivalents, and Cygwin has worked fine in our testing,
> but I have a couple of questions:
> 
> 1) Licensing. I've read the licensing pages, but I'm still confused.
> We're not porting a Unix/Linux application to Windows. All we need are
> a dozen or so packages (mainly from the Base category, plus a few
> others). Do we still need to purchase a special Cygwin license from
> Red Hat?


The Cygwin buy-out license covers the case in which a proprietary
application is linked against Cygwin and should stay proprietary.  In
this case you have to purchase the license.

If your closed-source applications are not linked against Cygwin, or if
you decide to convert the license of your product to a blessed open-
source license, then you don't have to purchase the Cygwin buy-out
license.

If Cygwin is only used for open-source tools which are packed with
your applications, then that's fine.  But see below.

> 2) Installer. As I mentioned before, SpongePACS is a product for the
> medical industry. Believe it or not, many doctors' offices do *not*
> have an Internet connection, so can we bundle a Cygwin installer that
> just has the needed packages, and include this installer on a CD with
> our product?

Whatever you do, please keep in mind that you have to provide the full
sources of Cygwin and all accompaning open-source tools.  If you fail to
give your customers the source codes, you're infringing the license.


HTH,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat