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Re: Cygwin now licensed under GPLv3+
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 04:04:25PM +1000, Luke Kendall wrote:
>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.
Again, there is nothing new here beyond 's/GPLv2/GPLv3'.
>>> 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 yet you are asking if somehow Red Hat had somehow assumed the
authority to change the licensing of packages that it doesn't own. It
did not.
>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.
It affects the Cygwin package which contains the DLL and other Cygwin
utilities found in the winsup directory.
cgf