Re: Mirosoft Interix contains Cygwin

[DJ Delorie <dj at delorie dot com>]

> The April 2000 distribution of MSDN Universal Subscription contains
> Microsoft Interix 2.2.

Cool!  Now even Microsoft is seeing the benefits of open source software.

> Burried way inside c:\Interix\usr\contriblib\gcc-lib\i386-pc-opennt is a
> directory called
> "cygnus-2.7.2-970404".  What actually it looks to me a GCC compiler
> stolen from Cygwin B19 stock distribution.

"Stolen" is the wrong word.  Remember, the whole point of the GPL is
to guarantee the *right* to copy such software.  Such guarantees work
equally for everyone - from the most prolific open source programmers
to the most rabid proprietary vendors.  If Microsoft wants to copy and
redistribute GPL'd software for their own benefit, that's fine - as
long as they play by the same rules everyone else plays by.

Plus, the i386-pc-opennt directory means that they *had* to rebuild
gcc from source, targetting their system.  This means that there are
now five wintel gccs - emx, djgpp, cygwin, mingw, and now interix.
The cygwin-* directory is just the version number, and there's no
reason why they couldn't start with sources from an old cygwin.

> During installation it poped 20 GPL and LGPL warnings and said if
> you need code go to Interix side and download... no code on the MSDN
> Subscription download or Distribution CD itself... is not it the GPL
> violation itself?

I don't think so, as long as you *can* get the code off the web.  I
think the FSF now allows web sites to fulfill the source requirement,
as long as the web site is run by the company distributing the
binaries.  I've heard rumors that the next GPL will allow this
explicitly, but that was a while ago...

But, if they are making sources available on the web, then they're
following the GPL more than the people we had to grant cygwin
exceptions to for binary-only distributions of "popular" packages.

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