Re: Copyright outdated? in Cygwin/X FAQ 12.6 and not addressed in Cygwin FAQ 7.1 link

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

On Feb 20 13:20, Brian Inglis wrote:
> Hi folks,
> [Addressing to patches as that's where we'll fix it, and not a general issue.]
> 
> Noticed that:
> 
> https://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-copyright-cygwin
> 
> "12.6. Who holds the copyright on the Cygwin source code?
> 
> Red Hat owns the copyright on the Cygwin source code. Red Hat requires that
> copyright be assigned to Red Hat for non-trivial changes to Cygwin. You must
> fill out a copyright transfer form if you are going to contribute
> substantial changes to Cygwin."
> 
> Has that not been assigned to the project?
> 
> And also:
> 
> https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.what.copyright
> 
> "7.1. What are the copyrights?
> 7.1.
> What are the copyrights?
> Please see https://cygwin.com/licensing.html for more information about
> Cygwin copyright and licensing."
> 
> ->
> 
> "Cygwin™ Linking Exception
> As a special exception, the copyright holders of the Cygwin library"
> 
> Is that the project?

Yes, that's the Cygwin project, not the distro as a whole.  All packages
in the distro have their own license.  THe above is strictly only about
the Cygwin project license as defined by ...

> [...]
> Or does it belong to the authors individually and/or the project or the

https://cygwin.com/git/?p=newlib-cygwin.git;a=blob;f=winsup/CYGWIN_LICENSE

After Red Hat stopped selling the Cygwin buyout license, Red Hat changed
the license of the DLL to "GPLv3+ w/ linking exception" and handed the
copyright over to the community, so the copyright holders are the
individual contributors, most of which are mentioned in
https://cygwin.com/git/?p=newlib-cygwin.git;a=blob;f=winsup/CONTRIBUTORS

The former buyout licenses had a pretty long lifetime, so it was
necessary from a legal perspective, that contributors passed over the
code under a BSD-2-clause license as long as the buyout licenses were
active.  This time has passed in the meantime, so we don't really need
the CONTRIBUTORS file anymore.

> "Cygwin authors" collectively?

The project doesn't "belong" anybody anymore.  The project has copyright
holders.  Those are the developers contributing code to the project
collectively.


Corinna