> The debates on licensing on this list go on for weeks and people feel
> passionately about the subject. It seems odd that no one speaks out about the
> GNU requirement of cygwin.
We respect the licensing requirements for that product. And certainly
the licensing requirement for cygwin are no less onerous than for other
products installed on a Windoze platform, or for Windoze itself.
My impression on the licensing requirement is that there is an
inconvenience factor in installing cygwin separately, and a cost factor
in trying to deliver an integrated build.
But I'm actually not certain about *any* onerous requirements for
cygwin, now that I look at it.
<disclaimer>
If we've already covered this, just remind me what Truth is, no need to
go over old territory.
</disclaimer>
Here are some points and questions:
1) cygwin is licensed under GPL. So is GNU/Linux, which provides the
same APIs as cygwin does. Linux does not pollute application licenses,
presumably because Linux itself is not *required* to run the
application; it could be run on another system just as well. That is
true for PostgreSQL's relationship to cygwin on Windows, right? Or has
GNU managed to carefully sort out all GPL vs LGPL issues for
applications and libraries to solve it that way?
2) If (1) does not exempt the PostgreSQL app from GPL polution, then why
not distribute PostgreSQL on Windows using a GPL license? It would be a
license fork, but there is no expectation that the GPL licensed code
would be anything other than a strict copy of the BSD code. And the
latter does not preclude anyone from taking the code and distributing it
under another license, as long as the BSD license is distributed also.
There is no problem distributing the PostgreSQL sources with the cygwin
package, so the requirements for the cygwin license can be fully met. I
think that this would be supported by the rest of the community, as long
as it was not an excuse to discuss GPL vs BSD for the main code base.
3) If (2) is the case, then development could continue under the BSD
license, since developers could use the BSD-original code for their
development work. So there is no risk of "backflow polution".
Thoughts (specific to PostgreSQL on cygwin/windoze, which is not a
happening thing at the moment)?
- Thomas
