> Two questions: (1) in what way is cygwin32.dll different from libc5.so > in this regard (since the license for both is the same: GPL) libc5 appears to be under the GPL, while libc6 appears to be under the LGPL. Weird. Does that mean that anything that is linked against libc5 has to be GPL'd? I'm surprised I haven't heard more about this - I obviously don't know the whole story. Maybe there is just widespread abuse of the GPL. If everyone is just ignoring it, that doesn't provide much legal protection for Cygnus if they're trying to make money off of cygwin.dll. > (2) the discussion wasn't writing *comercial* software with > anything, but writing *free* software with a pseudo-free package like > Qt... so how did we get here? There's *certainly* no problem writing > gpl'ed software with cygwin32.dll :-) There's not really any problem writing *free* software with Qt either. That's why I deliberately confused them together... Free software shouldn't be about confusion. > ps. A friend of mine with whom I've been discussing this says that > if we took all the time we've spent flaming about this and actually > *wrote some code* we wouldn't have the problem in the first place :-) I am working with cygwin.dll right now actually, trying to get dpkg to port to it (well, trying to hack it so I can get Perl to go, so then I can attempt to build dpkg). Klee is going to update the cross-compiler to assist me. Hopefully, cygwin.dll can become a part of the Debian distribution for a Win32 port, playing the same role as the Linux kernel. But it would be a shame if we have to reclassify the copyrights on every package in the distribution (and prohibit non-free stuff) just because of it. Cheers, - Jim
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