Christopher Faylor wrote: > Btw, the "other license" provision in the cygwin licensing web page was > really meant as a way to accommodate other, already existing projects.
And it was very gracious of them to do that. For an example of why this makes life a lot easier, consider MySQL (GPL) and OpenSSL (BSD). Now, the MySQL license has an "OpenSSL exemption" which means it's fine to link MySQL binaries against OpenSSL without forcing OpenSSL to the GPL. But, most GPL projects use the standard GPL with no execeptions. This means that if your distro packages ssl-enabled MySQL packages, including libmysqlclient, then using -lmysqlclient with your pure-GPL program violates a license because it pulls in the BSD OpenSSL code. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=283786 http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=6924 MySQL at some point figured out what kind of hell a widely used library that is only licensed under pure GPL could cause, and added their "FLOSS exception" which lists a number of acceptable licenses that can be used as an exception, much like Cygwin. http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/foss-exception.html But I think that was a relatively new thing, and until recently most distros were stuck with the prehistoric 3.23 version of mysql due to its libmysqlclient being the last LGPL version available. I presume this was done so that e.g. BSD-licensed programs can still use -lmysqlclient. This really hurt MySQL adoption though because if the vast majority of the world is still using 3.x then you really can't write software that depends on the great features in 4.0 and 4.1 or even 5.0. Last I checked RHEL and FC were *still* packaging this ancient version as their default, though that might have finally changed in RHEL4 and FC4, I don't know. Brian (sorry for the semi-off-topic rant.)