On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 09:05:56PM +0200, Jerry van Dijk wrote: >Christopher Faylor writes: >>Could I have some clarification on this? Why would the GPL make it >>impossible to build a cygwin-based release? It seems like gcc is >>licensed under the GPL and cygwin is licensed under the GPL, so... > >No doubt someone will at some point port GNAT to cygwin. Two years ago >I could not, since it required the payment of a license fee for every >user. That may or may not have changed, but it was the situation at >the time the decision had to be made.
The licensing for cygwin has not changed for some time. It is GPLed. It has been GPLed for a long time (five+ years at least). There is no reason to purchase a license to build GNAT. If that was the case, then how could anyone release a binary version of gcc? There are plenty of different versions of gcc and gcc cross compilers out there. A few come with the cygwin net release. Others are just built by individual users. Some are built by individual companies. We do have a buy-out license but I don't see how it applies here. The buy-out license comes into play when people do not want their binaries to be GPLed. In the case of gnat, since the resultatnt binary would be GPLed anyway, the buyout wouldn't do much good. Maybe I'm missing something here but it is hard to see what that could be. Anyway, Cygwin is obviously freely available and people are obviously building programs with it using gcc. We are obviously not asking for money from each of... Hey, wait a minute. Nevermind. Listen up, everyone! You all owe me money. Please send money to my paypal account immediately if you have ever built a program using cygwin gcc. I'll make sure that the money goes to the appropriate place. :-) cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/