On Feb 20 13:20, Brian Inglis wrote: > Hi folks, > [Addressing to patches as that's where we'll fix it, and not a general issue.] > > Noticed that: > > https://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-copyright-cygwin > > "12.6. Who holds the copyright on the Cygwin source code? > > Red Hat owns the copyright on the Cygwin source code. Red Hat requires that > copyright be assigned to Red Hat for non-trivial changes to Cygwin. You must > fill out a copyright transfer form if you are going to contribute > substantial changes to Cygwin." > > Has that not been assigned to the project? > > And also: > > https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.what.copyright > > "7.1. What are the copyrights? > 7.1. > What are the copyrights? > Please see https://cygwin.com/licensing.html for more information about > Cygwin copyright and licensing." > > -> > > "Cygwin™ Linking Exception > As a special exception, the copyright holders of the Cygwin library" > > Is that the project?
Yes, that's the Cygwin project, not the distro as a whole. All packages in the distro have their own license. THe above is strictly only about the Cygwin project license as defined by ... > [...] > Or does it belong to the authors individually and/or the project or the https://cygwin.com/git/?p=newlib-cygwin.git;a=blob;f=winsup/CYGWIN_LICENSE After Red Hat stopped selling the Cygwin buyout license, Red Hat changed the license of the DLL to "GPLv3+ w/ linking exception" and handed the copyright over to the community, so the copyright holders are the individual contributors, most of which are mentioned in https://cygwin.com/git/?p=newlib-cygwin.git;a=blob;f=winsup/CONTRIBUTORS The former buyout licenses had a pretty long lifetime, so it was necessary from a legal perspective, that contributors passed over the code under a BSD-2-clause license as long as the buyout licenses were active. This time has passed in the meantime, so we don't really need the CONTRIBUTORS file anymore. > "Cygwin authors" collectively? The project doesn't "belong" anybody anymore. The project has copyright holders. Those are the developers contributing code to the project collectively. Corinna
