Re: redhat does not answer ...

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

Hi Emmanuel,

On Dec 20 16:49, Emmanuel Torre wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to get informations from RedHat about Cygwin licensing  but
> after many emails without response, I wonder if somebody in this list
> could help me :

This is most unfortunate.  If you could send me the mail address you
used to contact Red Hat (in PM to vinschen AT redhat DOT com, please), I
will try to find out why you never got a reply.  This shouldn't happen.

> We redistribute Cygwin binaries (cygwin1.dll + some useful commands) as
> a part of an application we deliver to clients.
> According the GPL rules, as we _do not provide_ the source code of our
> application, it may be required to pay something no ?

It depends.  There are two cases.

The first case is, your application is a native Windows application
which is not linked against the Cygwin DLL.  The tools you provide are
just tool which are Open Source anyway, and which are bundeled with your
native application.  If this is what you do, you just have to distribute
the sources for the Cygwin DLL and the accompanying Open Source tools to
your customers, but not the sources of your application.  That's all.

The second case is, your application itself is linked against the Cygwin
DLL.  The tools you provide are closed source tools which you created
yourself.  In this case, you must provide the source codes of your
application to your customers under a license which is compatible with
the GPL (see http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html).

In this second case, if you're not able to provide your sources to your
customers, as you told, you have to purchase a Cygwin buyout license.
The license is a "per project" license with a fixed price.

Please check which of the above cases matches your situation.  If it's
the second case, please feel free to contact me again in private email
I will then forwarded your request to my manager.


Hope that helps,
Corinna


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