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Re: What's in it for Redhat?
- From: Warren Young <warren at etr-usa dot com>
- To: Cygwin-L <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 06:45:24 -0600
- Subject: Re: What's in it for Redhat?
- References: <9bbd279405072604461f18ac87@mail.gmail.com>
Alex Goldman wrote:
I'm curious, why did Redhat develop
"Why did Cygnus Solutions develop..." is a better question, because
Cygnus's main business was selling support and development contracts to
companies wanting to use GCC in uncommon ways. For instance, as a cross
compiler running on a Sun workstation targetting an embedded platform.
Or as a cross compiler running on Linux to build Win32 binaries, as is
the case with the cygwin1.dll development effort.
Red Hat is involved because they bought Cygnus back in the dot-com boom
days.
The business model rests on the fact that only Red Hat has copyright to
all of the Cygwin code proper (i.e. not including all the contributed
packages, or things like setup.exe). Since Cygwin proper is licensed
under the GPL by default, and Cygwin's GCC statically links a small
piece of Cygwin to your program, that means your program must be under a
GPL-compatible license if you want to use Cygwin for free. Red Hat
will, however, be happy to negotiate a different license with you if
those terms are unacceptable to you.
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