Re: system lags and dysfunctional after cygwin update

[Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com>]

On May 13, 2016, at 10:41 AM, Yaakov Selkowitz wrote:
> 
> On 2016-05-13 10:38, Warren Young wrote:
> 
>> But after taking a peek at the AST license, it’s pretty clear it’s incompatible
>> with the GPL.
> 
> True, but it is Open Source and therefore would be acceptable.

It depends on what “it” is.

The old AT&T AST license was most definitely not acceptable, requiring written acceptance of the license in order to transfer the source code.  You may remember the clickthrough license on the old AT&T AST site.  That’s fine for AT&T, but it doesn’t let Cygwin distribute source packages, for example.

There are other onerous terms in the AST license, too, such as a requirement that you tell AT&T in writing any time you made a patch to their software.  Thus if it doesn’t build OOTB on Cygwin, we couldn’t distribute it in binary-only form, either.

All of that apparently went away at some point, though, because the header comment in a few of the ksh source files I looked at say it’s under the Eclipse Public License now:

  https://github.com/att/ast

The old AST wasn’t even compatible with GitHub — no explicit license acceptance on git clone — but I think we can trust that as an official distribution of the ksh source code, since AT&T themselves link to the GitHub repo from here:

  http://www.research.att.com/software_tools

So never mind, I think we’re in the clear here.  But IANAL.
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