It is not quite true that WinCVS is GPL'ed. WinCVS uses the CodeJock MFC
library (www.codejock.com), which is NOT GPL. Below is a portion of the
CodeJock license (http://www.codejock.com/terms_of_use.htm):
>GRANT OF LICENSE
>Codejock.com. (hereinafter CODEJOCK) grants you a limited non-exclusive
>license to use the SOFTWARE free of charge ONLY if you are a student,
>faculty member or staff member of an educational institution or your use
>of the SOFTWARE is exclusively for non-commercial purposes, commercial
>developers are required to register.
>
>If you do not meet the requirements for free use of the SOFTWARE, you may
>use the SOFTWARE for up to thirty (30) days for the purpose of evaluating
>whether to purchase a commercial license. During this thirty (30) day
>period, you may use the SOFTWARE for evaluation purposes only, in house,
>without distribution of any source in any format either ASCII or binary.
>After which you must register or discontinue use of the SOFTWARE.
>
>If you are using the SOFTWARE free of charge under the terms of this
>Agreement, you are not entitled to any support whatsoever, and the
>statement " Portions Copyright (c) 1998-2000 CodeJock.com" must be
>included in either the "Splash Screen ", "About Box" or "Printed
>Documentation". Source code will NOT be supplied to free users of the SOFTWARE.
...
>DISTRIBUTION
>The SOFTWARE may be freely distributed provided that it is not modified
>and the original archive remains intact with all accompanying files, and
>provided that no fee is charged (except for any reasonable fees necessary
>to cover costs of distribution media).
This raises questions of whether WinCVS may be unintentionally violating
the GPL of CVS. I hadn't thought about this before, but now that I realize
that the GPL may prohibit distributing WinCVS in any form (commercial,
non-commercial, even from wincvs.org).
I looked to see whether there was a clean wall between the cvsntlib.dll
code, which encapsulates CVS and the WinCVS GUI, which links to CodeJock,
but many GPL files (for example, getopt.[ch], getline.[ch], ndir.[ch]) are
part of the WinCVS GUI build.
I hope very much that I am wrong in my interpretation, but I have a bad
feeling about this. If anyone can show me an error in my reasoning, I would
be most grateful! Perhaps Alexandre could comment on exactly what the legal
status of WinCVS is.
At 12:37 AM 7/14/2000, Eric Siegerman wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 at 11:37:03AM -0500, Shahrul Mazli wrote:
> > Currently I'm using WinCVS under a commercial enviroment [...]
> > My question is, can we use it freely or do we need certain approval
> > to use the copy.
>
>Short answer: You never need to obtain approval to use it. If
>you *redistribute* it, you still don't need approval, but you
>need to do certain things (like make the source available).
>
>Long answer: read the GPL. It's not that painful. Really. It's
>the COPYING file in the CVS distribution, or
>http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html
===========================================================================
Jonathan M. Gilligan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Research Assistant Professor of Physics (615) 343-6252
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Box 1807-B Fax: 343-7263
6823 Stevenson Center
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 Dep't Office: 322-2828
