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Cygwin licensing and redistribution, GPLv2, GPLv3


I've been looking into Cygwin licensing and redistribution regarding the Cygwin DLL and various GNU utilities. The current Cygwin license (http://cygwin.com/licensing.html) states (and I'm paraphrasing) that programs that use the Cygwin DLL do not need to be licensed under GPLv2 (or compatible) so long as they are distributed with a license that meets the OSI's open source definition AND that the cygwin DLL is not distributed with the program. With the release of the GPLv3 license and subsequent re-licensing, some of the GNU utilities included with the Cygwin distribution are now GPLv3 (or later). The GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses are not compatible (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility). The way I interpret this, this effectively means that no entity other than RedHat can distribute GPLv3 GNU utilities dynamically linked with the Cygwin DLL and include the Cygwin DLL with the GNU utilities (without additional permissions by RedHat). This also means that no entity other than RedHat can redistribute the RedHat Cygwin distribution or build their own Cygwin distribution unless all programs are linked with a static version of the Cygwin library (again, without additional permissions by RedHat). Does this sound right? If so, is this an intentional property of the Cygwin license?

Tom.


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