Re: What's in it for Redhat?

[Warren Young <warren at etr-usa dot com>]

Alex Goldman wrote:

> I'm curious, why did Redhat develop

"Why did Cygnus Solutions develop..." is a better question, because 
Cygnus's main business was selling support and development contracts to 
companies wanting to use GCC in uncommon ways.  For instance, as a cross 
compiler running on a Sun workstation targetting an embedded platform. 
Or as a cross compiler running on Linux to build Win32 binaries, as is 
the case with the cygwin1.dll development effort.

Red Hat is involved because they bought Cygnus back in the dot-com boom 
days.

The business model rests on the fact that only Red Hat has copyright to 
all of the Cygwin code proper (i.e. not including all the contributed 
packages, or things like setup.exe).  Since Cygwin proper is licensed 
under the GPL by default, and Cygwin's GCC statically links a small 
piece of Cygwin to your program, that means your program must be under a 
GPL-compatible license if you want to use Cygwin for free.  Red Hat 
will, however, be happy to negotiate a different license with you if 
those terms are unacceptable to you.

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