Re: seperate xfree project on sourceforge

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 07:25:17PM +1100, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Nov 2001 06:03, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> >Rasjid Wilcox had a very similar idea to winfree86 named winxterm (see
>> >http://lasp.sourceforge.net/winxterm/ ).  He has already produced a
>> > minimal cygwin + xfree of about 4mb.  If we can integrate the two
>> > projects winfree86 (or whatever its called) will be available much
>> > sooner.
>>
>> This sounds like YA ill-conceived fork.  And, oh joy, oh rapture, it is
>> also YA GPL violation.
>>
>> I've Cc'ed Rasjid.  Rasjid -- you need to provide the sources for the
>> binary packages that you are providing, in compliance with the GPL.  Just
>> providing a link to cygwin.com is not sufficient.
>>
>
>By all means enlighten me about the GPL.  On the 24 and 25 August 01, I
>posted to the list asking about GPL issues etc, and got no reply.
>(Well, in one email I asked about 'formalities', but what I meant was
>"Is what I've done okay?  Who should I talk to?  Please help me I've
>never put any open source stuff on the web before?".  In the other I
>mentioned the GPL.  Both were titled "Screen numbers", which makes
>sense when you read them.) I provided a link to my project so that
>people could have a look and inform me of what I needed to do, whether
>it was already being done or how it might be integrated with the main
>project.
>
>At the time I had only been on the list for 4 days, and was very new to
>the whole thing.  On the whole I still am, so I'm sorry if I've broken
>some rules.  It certainly was with no ill intent.

I doubt that anyone who is performing a community service like putting
up a web page ever has any ill intent.  I have, however, communicated
with a great number of people who are confused about the GPL and take
it personally when they are contacted regarding it.

I appreciate very much that you are interested in doing things the right
way.  I'm not sure how I missed your original mail.

Bottom line: if you have no binaries on your page, then there is no need
to provide sources.  If you do have binaries on your page then the
simplest way to be compliant with the GPL is to provide the
corresponding sources.

>The next step in my project was to remove the need for me to host any
>binaries anyway, and just to have a script the grabs the minimal set of
>required files from the cygwin-xfree mirrors.  My guess is that the new
>setup.exe for Cygwin (perhaps with a very minimal amount of tweaking)
>would be able to do that too, in which case I don't have to do
>anything! (Except presumably take down the binaries.)

Yes.  One of the primary goals of the new version of setup.exe was to
allow XFree86 to be installed as a cygwin package.  You can design a
setup.ini which downloads as little or as much as you want.  Or, just
wait for XFree86 to show up as a package.

cgf