redhat does not answer ...

redhat does not answer ...

[Emmanuel Torre]

Hi,

I am trying to get informations from RedHat about Cygwin licensing  but
after many emails without response, I wonder if somebody in this list
could help me :

We redistribute Cygwin binaries (cygwin1.dll + some useful commands) as
a part of an application we deliver to clients.
According the GPL rules, as we _do not provide_ the source code of our
application, it may be required to pay something no ?

The RH site is quite laconic on its Cygwin page. As GPL is not easy to
understand, respecting the rules is not obvious.

Help !

Thank you very much

Regards,
Emmanuel

Re: redhat does not answer ...

[Corinna Vinschen]

Hi Emmanuel,

On Dec 20 16:49, Emmanuel Torre wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to get informations from RedHat about Cygwin licensing  but
> after many emails without response, I wonder if somebody in this list
> could help me :

This is most unfortunate.  If you could send me the mail address you
used to contact Red Hat (in PM to vinschen AT redhat DOT com, please), I
will try to find out why you never got a reply.  This shouldn't happen.

> We redistribute Cygwin binaries (cygwin1.dll + some useful commands) as
> a part of an application we deliver to clients.
> According the GPL rules, as we _do not provide_ the source code of our
> application, it may be required to pay something no ?

It depends.  There are two cases.

The first case is, your application is a native Windows application
which is not linked against the Cygwin DLL.  The tools you provide are
just tool which are Open Source anyway, and which are bundeled with your
native application.  If this is what you do, you just have to distribute
the sources for the Cygwin DLL and the accompanying Open Source tools to
your customers, but not the sources of your application.  That's all.

The second case is, your application itself is linked against the Cygwin
DLL.  The tools you provide are closed source tools which you created
yourself.  In this case, you must provide the source codes of your
application to your customers under a license which is compatible with
the GPL (see http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html).

In this second case, if you're not able to provide your sources to your
customers, as you told, you have to purchase a Cygwin buyout license.
The license is a "per project" license with a fixed price.

Please check which of the above cases matches your situation.  If it's
the second case, please feel free to contact me again in private email
I will then forwarded your request to my manager.


Hope that helps,
Corinna


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

Re: redhat does not answer ...

[Emmanuel Torre]

Thanks you for your attention.

we have no usual contact at RedHat company.
As we are in France, we mailed a few days ago to germany@redhat.com & 
europe@redhat.com, as mentioned on the RH site.

Precedently, some years ago, we used to deliver bash scripts to our 
clients so no compilation at all.
Now we use an utility (SHC) that generates a C program (one per bash 
script) that contains the encrypted bash script. The C program decrypts 
the bash and execute it on the fly.

These C programs are compiled with gcc in a Cygwin environment and needs 
the cygwin1.dll to be able to execute (else you get the cygwin1.dll not 
found when double-clicking on the .exe) : so we can say it is linked 
against the cygwin1.dll.

Can you give me the price of such a license ?

Thank you very much.

Regards,
Emmanuel

Re: redhat does not answer ...

[Corinna Vinschen]

Hi Emmanuel,

On Dec 20 18:14, Emmanuel Torre wrote:
> Thanks you for your attention.
> 
> we have no usual contact at RedHat company.
> As we are in France, we mailed a few days ago to germany@redhat.com & 
> europe@redhat.com, as mentioned on the RH site.

I'm sorry to hear that.  Thanks for the information.

> Precedently, some years ago, we used to deliver bash scripts to our 
> clients so no compilation at all.
> Now we use an utility (SHC) that generates a C program (one per bash 
> script) that contains the encrypted bash script. The C program decrypts 
> the bash and execute it on the fly.
> 
> These C programs are compiled with gcc in a Cygwin environment and needs 
> the cygwin1.dll to be able to execute (else you get the cygwin1.dll not 
> found when double-clicking on the .exe) : so we can say it is linked 
> against the cygwin1.dll.
> 
> Can you give me the price of such a license ?

Sorry, but I'm not the right person to talk about our pricing.

I'll forward all information I got from you to my manager and somebody
will contact you about this very soon.


Thanks again,
Corinna


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