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

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

[Giovanni Organtini]

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.

Can you provide a short text for it?

Thank you very much

--
Giovanni Organtini
Dip. di Fisica Univ. "La Sapienza" & INFN-Sez. di Roma
P.le A. Moro 2 - 00185 Roma (Tel. +39.06.4991.4329 Fax: +39.06.4453.829)

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

[Corinna Vinschen]

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.

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

[Giovanni Organtini]

Thanks a lot. For sure we will fix the "spelling" of Cygwin.

For what concern the distribution it's ok, so we will not distribute
it on the CD, however let me explain why and how we would like to do
so. Maybe it can make it clear to other people.

We know about the fact that GPL requires distributing the source code,
however it is not forbidden to distribute them in a different way
(i.e. doanloadable from a web page). So this was our original
intention.

It's true that the CD will contain "old" version of the software,
however it can be useful for many students to test it rapidly, without
the need to connect to the network. Then they can download the latest
version from the site. As a matter of fact, the speed of the Internet
connections in Italy is not so high everywhere :-(.

I understand very clearly the point about support. So, the final
decision will be not to include the distribution in the CD. However we
will continue recommending it in the text.

Thank you

On 12/6/05, Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> 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.
>


--
Giovanni Organtini
Dip. di Fisica Univ. "La Sapienza" & INFN-Sez. di Roma
P.le A. Moro 2 - 00185 Roma (Tel. +39.06.4991.4329 Fax: +39.06.4453.829)

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

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 04:09:12PM +0100, Giovanni Organtini wrote:
>Thanks a lot. For sure we will fix the "spelling" of Cygwin.
>
>For what concern the distribution it's ok, so we will not distribute
>it on the CD, however let me explain why and how we would like to do
>so. Maybe it can make it clear to other people.
>
>We know about the fact that GPL requires distributing the source code,
>however it is not forbidden to distribute them in a different way
>(i.e. doanloadable from a web page). So this was our original
>intention.

Actually, if you are distributing the binaries via CD, it is "forbidden"
to only distribute the source code on a web site.  You really do have to
distribute the sources with the binaries.

It would probably be instructive to read the GPL FAQ at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html if you haven't already, specfically:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributeWithSourceOnInternet