Re: distributing CygWin on a CD with a textbook: how to acknowloedge

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

Hi Giovanni,

On Dec  6 10:22, Giovanni Organtini wrote:
> Hi.
> Me and my colleagues are writing a textbook on Scientific Programming
> for degree students. It will be published by Addison Wesley (in
> Italian, first, then we hope to translate it in English). The content
> of the book is almost platform independent, but we suggested UNIX for
> many applications and CygWin as a tool to be used at home for
> exercises.
> 
> We are wondering about including a CD in the textbook with the
> complete CygWin distribution on it. According to the license terms, as
> far as I understand, this is feasible. However, of course, we would
> like to acknowledge the authors in the text. The acknowledgments
> should be short, of course, but complete. I have not found in the site
> a clear statement about how to properly acknowledge you excellent
> work.

First of all, it's "Cygwin", not "CygWin", lower case 'w', not upper
case 'W'.  Please fix that before publishing.

Licensewise it's *not* ok to put the whole distro on a CD and add it to
the book, unless you also add a CD to the book which contains at least
all sources of all GPLed packages from the distro, too.  According to
the GPL you must provide the sources the same way you provide the
binaries, otherwise you're infringing the licensing.  For a start, see
the GPL FAQ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html, or better the full
text of the GPL  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html.

I'd rather see that you don't provide a CD with Cygwin, but only provide
the URL to the Cygwin homepage http://cygwin.com and let the people
download from the net distribution.  This way, they get the latest
available packages and bug fixes, and using the setup tool from
http://cygwin.com is really simple and straightforward.

There's also the problem of support.  Since readers of your book will
use your CD distro in the first place, they will inescabably use old
versions of Cygwin and the accompanying packages.  However, since you
will probably not have a support forum, your readers will ask on the
Cygwin mailing list for help.  The Cygwin mailing list only supports
users of the net distro, not of third party distros.  So why not let
your users just use the net distro in the first place?

As for acknowledgement, see http://cygwin.com/who.html.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat, Inc.