Mail Archives: cygwin/2000/05/01/20:58:11
DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com> wrote:
> > 1. Chris was complaining about the lack of *external* contributions
> > to the project. Whether you like it or not, the current licensing of
> > Cygwin has a significant effect on whether some developers
> > contribute. It certainly has for me.
>
> I understand that. I don't understand what you hope to gain by us
> not offering proprietary-use licenses.
It is not what *I* hope to gain, but what *you* would hope to gain.
If you want my contributions (and perhaps those of others who feel
the same way), you would get them if the license was LGPL. Then I
would be willing to contribute because my changes we would be as free
to you as the next guy.
If you don't care about external contributions then so be it. But
that was after all how this discussion started.
> > 2. If the licensing was changed, I believer more external developers
> > would contribute to the project.
>
> So, if the license were 100% GPL with no option for non-gpl use,
> you'd contribute?
Yes I would, since then I could use it for GPL'ed tools on the Win32
platform. The only real use I would personally have for Cygwin would
be to run GNU tools under Win32. I personally don't have any need to
port commercial Unix software to the Win32 platform.
> > 3. If Cygnus needs to sell expensive commercial licenses of Cygwin
> > in order to continue development, then the Open Source principles
> > have simply failed for this project.
>
> Fortunately, we're not as interested in "open source principles"
> as we are interested in the principles of *free software*. All
> version of Cygwin are distributed under the terms of the GPL. Some
> customers purchase the right to also use it in other ways, but no
> customer is bereft of the rights and freedoms the GPL grants them.
> I don't think you fully understand the significance of this.
There are two issues at work here. One is that the Cygwin library is
under GPL and hence requires other software to be GPL (or Open Source
as the new license allows). The second is that this library is also
available under a commercial license from you guys. If I made any
changes to Cygwin I would want my changes to remain under GPL only,
so I would not assign my copyright to Cygnus. Then my changes would
not get into the Cygwin core distribution, and I would have to fork
my own version. For all that it really isn't worth the effort I would
have to put in, so I don't contribute.
> What you seem to want is the ability, or "right", to use our free
> software in your proprietary product, so that you can make more
> money, without us making more money too. Sorry, that's not one of
> the principles we're interested in.
Nope. I don't have any proprietry product that I am building that
would use or be based on Cygwin.
I just don't feel it is right for a product to be branded as 'free
software' when it is dual licensed with an exclusive commercial
license also. At least I am not interested in contributing to making
it better.
> Every Cygnus employee (and every RH employee, I think) signs a
> form that assigns *all* copyright to the FSF for any FSF-owned
> software we work on. The FSF could, if they wanted (but they
> won't), sell a proprietary-use license for GCC. Would that stop
> you from contributing to gcc? It doesn't stop us.
The FSF is against doing exactly that. If the FSF did one day turn
around and start selling proprietry-use licenses for FSF projects,
you can get that the entire Open Source community would be up in arms
about it. So why should Cygnus be allowed to behave any differently?
Regards,
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