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Re: Cygwin now licensed under GPLv3+


[I'm reposting this as it's been 5 weeks since I posted it, and have just had the mail returned to me saying that the moderator hasn't acted on it, so I should repost it if I feel that is an error.]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
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.


I didn't think I *was* asking that, and in fact I honestly can't see how what I asked could be interpreted that way, but obviously I asked my question so poorly that it could be interpreted that way. I'm sorry.


Maybe what's causing the confusion is that we're talking about something that's blindingly obvious to you, but not obvious to people who aren't as deeply involved with Cygwin as you are (e.g.: me)?

I wonder if perhaps you have a very precise understanding of what is meant by "cygwin" in `Red Hat has relicensed Cygwin from "GNU Public License version 2" (GPLv2) to"GNU Public License version 3 or later" (GPLv3+)', whereas my (probably wrong) interpretation of "cygwin" is "the stuff you can install by Cygwin's setup.exe".

(Anyway, that's a very secondary topic. My real question is below.)

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.


Sorry if I'm being thick - I'm genuinely trying to understand what you mean. By the "Cygwin package", I guess you *don't* mean "the package described in the `@ cygwin' section in setup.ini", do you?


I say that because I looked in my old Cygwin install ("find c:/ d:/ -type d -name winsup -print") for a winsup directory but couldn't find it, and then fetched the latest cygwin-1.7.9-1.tar.bz2 and looked inside that for a winsup directory but again couldn't find a directory called anything like "winsup".

So because I couldn't find it, I'm sorry to say I'm now unsure what you mean by either "the Cygwin package" or "the winsup directory".

Could you explain a little more? I'm sorry if I'm being difficult.

Regards,

luke

cgf




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