On Tue, 8 Jul 1997, Gordon Irlam wrote:

The new licensing terms for Cygwin32 permits anyone to make use of Cygwin32 without adhering to the GPL, and without being required to make their sources available, provided that in so doing they are not attempting to directly compete with Cygnus. The reason we decided it was necessary to prevent the use of Cygwin32 by companies that are competing directly with Cygnus is explained below.

Cygnus specializes in the provision of development tools for embedded systems. Cygnus is responsible for perhaps 80% of all on going GCC development, and 95% of all GDB development. We commercialize our development efforts through our GNUPro compiler tool chain. Other people and organizations contribute to, and benefits from our work.

Translating into readable English, I read here: "You are not allowed to create competing development tools based on cygwin32"

How does this affect other GNU compilers, like GNU Pascal and GNU Fortran?

I created and maintain the (cygwin32 based) win32 port of GNU Pascal. We will surely try to convert the world to Pascal ;-)

Will it violate the new license terms to use cygwin32?

J.J. van der Heijden

--- With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead. -- RFC1925.