Re: Cygwin now licensed under GPLv3+

[Luke Kendall <luke dot kendall at cisra dot canon dot com dot au>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 01:37:52PM +1000, Luke Kendall wrote:
>   
> > Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >     
> > > Hi Cygwin friends and users,
> > >
> > >
> > > I'm happy to announce that, effective immediately, Red Hat has
> > > relicensed Cygwin from "GNU Public License version 2" (GPLv2) to
> > > "GNU Public License version 3 or later" (GPLv3+).
> > >
> > >   
> > >       
> > What does that mean in terms of Cygwin components?
> >     
>
> Corinna referenced a page:
>
> http://cygwin.com/licensing.html
>
> which barely changed except to mention GPLv3.  This many-month old email
> was just meant to announce that the Cygwin DLL and associated utilities
> were moving from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
>
>   

Yes.

> > Each component normally has its own license, so does the above
> > statement mean that things like the Cygwin DLL and other Cygwin-only
> > components are under GPLv3?
> >     
>
> Red Hat did not suddenly assume the extralegal power to change the
> licensing of other packages.
>
>   

Naturally. 

And there are over 1,800 packages in Cygwin.  So I imagine that the 
change to the GPLv3+ has no effect on any of them.

> > Is there an explicit list or a precise description of what parts of 
> > Cygwin are covered by GPLv3?
> >     
>
> You mean like the very web page that you quoted below?
>
>   
> > > The Open Source Licensing Exception persists, as well as the
> > > availability of the Cygwin Alternative License, as described on
> > > http://cygwin.com/licensing.html
> > >       

I couldn't find the information on that page.  To me (perhaps I'm 
misreading it?), I could only find two precise pieces of information:

1) programs linked with libcygwin.a can still use the Red Hat exception 
license for it (provided they don't distribute libcygwin.a itself, too)
2) The Cygwin DLL is under GPLv3+

I could see no explicit list, nor any precise description of what parts 
of Cygwin are covered by GPLv3.

Are you saying that the list only contains two items, libcygwin.a and 
the Cygwin DLL?
I thought there might be some others, like some special Cygwin-only 
parts of X11.

I apologise for asking the question so many months after the announcement.

Regards,

luke