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Re: Documentation on -mno-cygwin Accuracy


On 2/7/2012 4:14 PM, carolus wrote:
On 2/7/2012 3:12 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:

There's the usual misconception about the GPL. If you create an application which is linked against the Cygwin DLL (or any other GPLed library), but you only use the application in-house, there's no reason at all to distribute the source code to your collegues. If one of them really wants it, he can always ask you, right? Only if you provide the binaries to customers or to the world in some way, you are supposed to provide the sources codes as well in a GPL-compatible way.


In a publication I have offered to furnish on request the source code and windows executable for a program that I personally run under cygwin. Don't I have to use mingw for the publicly distributed version, or else bundle the executable with cygwin source code? As I understand, simply providing a link to the cygwin web site does not satisfy the license.

Well, if you don't want them to have to install Cygwin, then that's a bigger issue than just licensing. Think of Cygwin like an OS. If you want to create something that can run under Windows, not Cygwin, then you have to build it for Windows, not Cygwin. I don't know that it is even possible to simply "bundle" Cygwin with your application. Cygwin isn't just some little collection of libraries or something. It's a whole system that must be correctly installed on someone's computer.


If you really want Mingw (a free compiler and development environment for Windows), maybe what you should do is just download and install Mingw, and use that, instead of doing it through the Cygwin compiler using a barely-supported option. (Then you should get help with any problems you have over at Mingw's website instead of here.)

I hope I'm not out of line to suggest that on this list, but it sounds like it's what you're really looking for.

--
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| Jesse Ziser, Code Warrior |
| Applied Research Labs: UT |
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