RE: cygwin vs. MKS Toolkit

["McCunney, Dennis" <DMcCunney@roper.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Suhaib Siddiqi [mailto:ssiddiqi@ipass.net]
> Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 5:21 PM
> To: cygwin@sourceware.cygnus.com
> Subject: RE: cygwin vs. MKS Toolkit
> 
> > I think you might be sailing a bit close to a lawsuit.
> 
> Yes sure, Should I also give you the e-mail address of the guys from
> DataFocus?
> 
> >As far as
> > I'm aware, there is no connection between the GNU utilities and
> > the MKS toolkit for NT (apart from the obvious that both aim to
> > implement the POSIX tools as a subset of their functionality).
> 
> MKS Toolkit is NOT a POSIX implementation Win32.  MKS Toolkit is a
> colection binutils like stuff, e.g. tar, ls etc.
> POSIX implementation is from Datafocus (who recently bought MKS)
> and it is called NuTCracker.

The MKS Toolkit never claimed to be POSIX compliant.  They _did_
try to be SysV compatible insofar as the underlying OS allowed it.

The issue is that MKS does _not_, to my knowledge, use GNU code as 
the base.  They had their own source tree for the utilities they 
offered, developed internally, since back before the GNU binutils 
existed in DOS/Win32 ports.  While it's possible they subsequently 
picked up and used the GNU source (I'm several releases behind in my 
copy, and I may have missed a later development) I doubt it, as the 
GNU liscense would likely forbid it, and they wouldn't need to since 
they already had code that was developed, stable, and worked for most
of what GNU binutils provides.

You may not care for the Toolkit, but claiming they are charging
for free software is probably untrue.

______
Dennis



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