Re: YA Licensing question

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@cygwin.com>]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 04:27:42PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>
>Disclaimer:  I'm not a lawyer.  If you want to be on the safe side
>license-wise, consider to ask a lawyer specialized in software
>licensing questions for legal advice.

Ditto.  So, you really should not rely on opinions in a mailing list as
a basis for a company decision.

>Having said that...
>
>On Dec  3 09:42, Steve Duquette wrote:
>>I have looked through your FAQ's, read the GPL at least a thousand
>>times, Googled this question to death, and finally read every one of
>>the entries in the cygwin-licensing mailing list, but just can't seem
>>to find my exact case.
>>
>>I am wondering if we could just install Cygwin on to the PCs we ship as
>>part of a larger system so that we can use the NFS server.  We need NFS
>>because another part of the system is Linux based (diskless) and needs
>>to connect to the Windows host.

The reason that you need to distribute things is, of course, irrelevant
and has no bearing on the GPL.

>Why don't you just use the SMB client which is usually part of the
>Linux kernel anyway?  This allows to connect to Windows machines
>without the requirement to install Cygwin and an NFS client on the
>Windows side.

Good question.

>You don't have to reply to this question, it's just a hint that there
>are other, simpler solutions available.
>
>>We don't compile anything against Cygwin, we just would run nfsd,
>>portmap, and mountd.  Would we be legal to ship these systems with
>>Cygwin preinstalled on them?
>
>If you're installing Cygwin only to run other OSS software, like the
>NFS server, you're fine, *iff* you ship the source code of the Cygwin
>tools to your customers as well.  It's definitely *not* enough to point
>them to the Cygwin homepage.  By shipping GPL software you're
>responsible to provide your customer with the exact sources needed to
>rebuild the GPLed software.

Right and remember that "Cygwin tools" includes source code for the
cygwin DLL and any other DLLs that are required to run the tools.

This is basic GPL and it makes me wonder how you could have missed this
if you did the research that you claim to have done.  You provide source
code to any binaries that you distribute.  It's pretty simple.