Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how that's a license), and some are public domain. I'm just wondering what's the recommended way to check that use of Cygwin internally at a company (no re-distribution) complies with all the licenses. Obviously, if Cygwin (Red Hat?) provided answers to the above questions, it would save an enormous amount of repeated legal work. (N hours per license per company that uses Cygwin.) 1. Is there a complete list of all the licenses used by all the packages (rather than the above broad statement about an incomplete set of the licenses)? 2. Do you provide a statement that the licenses are compatible with each other? 3. Do you provide a statement that no package is licensed under terms that disallow commercial use? 4. Does each package have a license? (If not, I don't understand how someone could legally use it - is there some implied license if none is provided?) To be fair, apart from a Yes to question 2 for Debian/Ubuntu, I don't know the answers to questions 1, 3 4 for Linux distributions, either. Hopefully, luke -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
On Sep 29 19:18, Luke Kendall wrote: The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how that's a license), and some are public domain. I'm just wondering what's the recommended way to check that use of Cygwin internally at a company (no re-distribution) complies with all the licenses. Obviously, if Cygwin (Red Hat?) provided answers to the above questions, it would save an enormous amount of repeated legal work. (N hours per license per company that uses Cygwin.) First of all, it might depend on the selection of packages you made since, obviously, licenses of packages which you don't use are no concern for you. So, sure, Red Hat *could* do that, but that would mean to take over responsibility for something which is in the responsibility of the user in the first place. Eventually only a lawyer can make sure you comply, but, apart from the responsibility, the job of a lawyer isn't exactly for free. So this is a job to redirect to *your* legal department. A list of licenses used in Cygwin packages is in the cygwin-docs package, plus, every package with a non-standard license typically provides it under /usr/share/doc/packagename. However, there's no guarantee that the list is complete. As for licenses with commercial exceptions, personally (IANAL, and I'm not speaking for Red Hat, nor for the Cygwin community at large, nor did I actually search for it) I think there is none in the distro, except for the Cygwin license itself. And that only applies to exceptions from the GPL. Other than that, licensing questions should better go to the cygwin-licensing mailing list. Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Red Hat -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
Corinna Vinschen wrote: On Sep 29 19:18, Luke Kendall wrote: The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how that's a license), and some are public domain. I'm just wondering what's the recommended way to check that use of Cygwin internally at a company (no re-distribution) complies with all the licenses. Obviously, if Cygwin (Red Hat?) provided answers to the above questions, it would save an enormous amount of repeated legal work. (N hours per license per company that uses Cygwin.) First of all, it might depend on the selection of packages you made since, obviously, licenses of packages which you don't use are no concern for you. Of course. But assuming one chooses to install everything ... Um, and assuming that we found a list of packages that had no licenses, and a list of packages with licenses that we can't accept, is there any way to supply setup with a pre-defined list of packages to include or exclude? Or would everyone installing Cygwin at our company have to read through a list of disallowed-by-our-company packages and deselect each one (after first clicking on All)? So, sure, Red Hat *could* do that, but that would mean to take over responsibility for something which is in the responsibility of the user in the first place. Eventually only a lawyer can make sure you comply, but, apart from the responsibility, the job of a lawyer isn't exactly for free. So this is a job to redirect to *your* legal department. I don't think my four questions asked for legal advice, they were about asking if someone had done the groundwork to enable legal checks to be of only normal difficulty. By that I mean, normally you get the license(s) text, you don't have to hunt for that. As an engineer, it seems inefficient if every company that wants to use Cygwin first has to spend several days/weeks finding all the licenses across 2000(?) packages, distilling the license files down into a set, find any that forbid commercial use, checking that the remaining licenses are compatible with each other, and *then, finally* checking each unique license in the usual way. A list of licenses used in Cygwin packages is in the cygwin-docs package, plus, every package with a non-standard license typically provides it under /usr/share/doc/packagename. Thanks, that's very helpful, and is an excellent example of how some collected information can save a lot of companies a lot of work to check they can use Cygwin. Using your information, I can create a script that produces a list of all the licenses. I guess if the license files themselves have varying names (ideally they'd all be just license.txt), I may need to then add some heuristics to pick the license file out. From that I can then create something that produces just a set of the unique licenses. And then I can pass that to our legal department. I can also diff it against new Cygwin releases to identify changes to licenses and new licenses added for new packages. However, there's no guarantee that the list is complete. Erk, that sounds scary. Does that mean the process for adding new packages doesn't include adding the license information into the license list? Would that be a process improvement that could be considered for the future? As for licenses with commercial exceptions, personally (IANAL, and I'm not speaking for Red Hat, nor for the Cygwin community at large, nor did I actually search for it) I think there is none in the distro, except for the Cygwin license itself. I can't see anything in http://cygwin.com/licensing.html that says Cygwin can't be used for commercial purposes (thank goodness!). Maybe you meant something else. And that only applies to exceptions from the GPL. Other than that, licensing questions should better go to the cygwin-licensing mailing list. I didn't know it existed. Sorry. I'd better subscribe to it, and I'll take my questions there, and stop troubling this list. Thanks again, luke Corinna -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
On Sep 29 20:32, Luke Kendall wrote: Corinna Vinschen wrote: So, sure, Red Hat *could* do that, but that would mean to take over responsibility for something which is in the responsibility of the user in the first place. Eventually only a lawyer can make sure you comply, but, apart from the responsibility, the job of a lawyer isn't exactly for free. So this is a job to redirect to *your* legal department. I don't think my four questions asked for legal advice, In a way, yes. Licensing is dangerous territory. If we claim there's no exception from A and somebody find that exception, it's a sure way to be sued. I, for one, can do without that. As an engineer, [...] As a lawyer, [...] I'm with you on the engineering side, since I hate to reinvent the wheel same as you do. However, this isn't technical, this is legal and as such I stay away as much as possible. As for licenses with commercial exceptions, personally (IANAL, and I'm not speaking for Red Hat, nor for the Cygwin community at large, nor did I actually search for it) I think there is none in the distro, except for the Cygwin license itself. I can't see anything in http://cygwin.com/licensing.html that says Cygwin can't be used for commercial purposes (thank goodness!). Maybe you meant something else. And that only applies to exceptions from the GPL. You ignored the above sentence, which was the important one. Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Red Hat -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
Corinna Vinschen wrote: On Sep 29 20:32, Luke Kendall wrote: Corinna Vinschen wrote: So, sure, Red Hat *could* do that, but that would mean to take over responsibility for something which is in the responsibility of the user in the first place. Eventually only a lawyer can make sure you comply, but, apart from the responsibility, the job of a lawyer isn't exactly for free. So this is a job to redirect to *your* legal department. I don't think my four questions asked for legal advice, In a way, yes. Licensing is dangerous territory. If we claim there's no exception from A and somebody find that exception, it's a sure way to be sued. I, for one, can do without that. As an engineer, [...] As a lawyer, [...] :-) I'm with you on the engineering side, since I hate to reinvent the wheel same as you do. However, this isn't technical, this is legal and as such I stay away as much as possible. Fair enough! As for licenses with commercial exceptions, personally (IANAL, and I'm not speaking for Red Hat, nor for the Cygwin community at large, nor did I actually search for it) I think there is none in the distro, except for the Cygwin license itself. I can't see anything in http://cygwin.com/licensing.html that says Cygwin can't be used for commercial purposes (thank goodness!). Maybe you meant something else. And that only applies to exceptions from the GPL. You ignored the above sentence, which was the important one. I confess I didn't ignore it, I just couldn't understand it. Trying again now, I think you meant that there were no exceptions that applied only in commercial situations, except some exceptions relating to the GPL (looking at the license, I think it's related to redistribution of code that depends on GPL stuff). I don't think you mean it is saying you are not allowed to use Cygwin within a company, Cygwin is only for personal or scientific non-commercial research, and I'm happy that I can't see that. :-) luke Corinna -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
RE: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
Um, and assuming that we found a list of packages that had no licenses, and a list of packages with licenses that we can't accept, is there any way to supply setup with a pre-defined list of packages to include or exclude? Or would everyone installing Cygwin at our company have to read through a list of disallowed-by-our-company packages and deselect each one (after first clicking on All)? If you're in search of a centralised approach, it's a fairly easy exercise to run your own internal mirror, containing only those packages that you've verified as acceptable. We do just that here for different reasons -- we need to patch certain packages for various reasons. Once that has been set up, then everyone can simply install from there and be sure that they're not getting any packages with legal problems. You'd still need someone to do that checking in the first place, though. Accelrys Limited (http://accelrys.com) Registered office: 334 Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge, CB4 0WN, UK Registered in England: 2326316 -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
Stephen Bennett wrote: Um, and assuming that we found a list of packages that had no licenses, and a list of packages with licenses that we can't accept, is there any way to supply setup with a pre-defined list of packages to include or exclude? Or would everyone installing Cygwin at our company have to read through a list of disallowed-by-our-company packages and deselect each one (after first clicking on All)? If you're in search of a centralised approach, it's a fairly easy exercise to run your own internal mirror, containing only those packages that you've verified as acceptable. We do just that here for different reasons -- we need to patch certain packages for various reasons. Once that has been set up, then everyone can simply install from there and be sure that they're not getting any packages with legal problems. You'd still need someone to do that checking in the first place, though. Good suggestion, that'd work. Thanks! luke Accelrys Limited (http://accelrys.com) Registered office: 334 Cambridge Science Park, Cambridge, CB4 0WN, UK Registered in England: 2326316 -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 08:54:01PM +1000, Luke Kendall wrote: I don't think you mean it is saying you are not allowed to use Cygwin within a company, Cygwin is only for personal or scientific non-commercial research, and I'm happy that I can't see that. :-) Cygwin is basically GPL-based. How, exactly, would something like that satisfy the terms of the GPL? That would certainly limit your freedom to use the software. The main thrust of the non-Red Hat release of Cygwin is to make sure that anyone who has the binaries can also get the source code. That shouldn't be as big a deal within a company as it is for a company which attempts to sell Cygwin or Cygwin-based applications. cgf -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 08:32:06PM +1000, Luke Kendall wrote: As an engineer, it seems inefficient if every company that wants to use Cygwin first has to spend several days/weeks finding all the licenses across 2000(?) packages, distilling the license files down into a set, find any that forbid commercial use, checking that the remaining licenses are compatible with each other, and *then, finally* checking each unique license in the usual way. If this is inconvenient for you, you could always start an effort to develop a tool to check into licenses or you could develop the tool and distribute it yourself. You can't give lip service to understanding that this is a volunteer effort and then talk about inefficiencies. In a volunteer effort, pointing out problems that no one is interested in working on is not apt to make the problems go away. In an open source project, the proven solution for this dilemma is to move from being one of the consumers with a problem to becoming one of the volunteers working towards a solution. cgf -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
On 29/09/2009 10:18, Luke Kendall wrote: The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how that's a license), and some are public domain. That should probably read X11 license rather than X11 copyright. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Re: Four license questions that affect commercial use of Cygwin
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:46:32PM +0100, Jon TURNEY wrote: On 29/09/2009 10:18, Luke Kendall wrote: The URL http://cygwin.com/licensing.html (in summary) says that most Cygwin software is licensed under GNU GPL, X11 copyright (not sure how that's a license), and some are public domain. That should probably read X11 license rather than X11 copyright. Thanks. I've made that change. cgf -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
